Crossroads

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication year

2021

ISBN

9780374181178

Crossroads, the first novel in Jonathan Franzen's projected trilogy, follows the Hildebrandt family over the winter of 1971 in suburban Chicago. Russ, an associate pastor, his wife Marion and their children each face private moral crises around faith, desire and integrity. Set against a church...

Over a few charged weeks in the winter of 1971, every member of an Illinois pastor's family arrives at a private moral reckoning in Jonathan Franzen's finest novel in years. Russ Hildebrandt covets a parishioner while losing status to a hipper youth minister; his wife Marion harbors a startling past; their children chase goodness, oblivion and one another's regard. Franzen takes religion seriously as few contemporary American novelists do, treating his characters' struggles over sin and grace with sympathy rather than irony. The result is a deeply absorbing family novel, slower and warmer than his earlier work, that asks what it means to be good when every choice implicates someone else. As the opening volume of a trilogy it patiently lays foundations, yet stands complete and satisfying on its own. Psychologically acute and morally serious, Crossroads restores the old pleasures of the realist novel - interiority, consequence, a whole society glimpsed through one imperfect household.