Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Overall Rating: 4 Stars

One of my favorite shows of all time, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, is a show that is about terrible people. Dennis, Charlie, Dee, Mac, Frank — all of them horrid human beings who do unspeakable things to the people around them, for the comedy. As a viewer, you watch knowing that the gang aren’t supposed to have redeeming qualities, but you root for them nonetheless.

Crossroads, the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen, felt cut from a similar cloth. This is certainly not a comedy, but, Franzen has created a cast characters who are similarly horrible.

The novel follows the Hildebrant family. Russ, a minister, his wife, Marion, their oldest son, Clem, daughter Becky, and younger brothers Perry and Judson. It follows their family around the holidays, notably Christmas and Easter, in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois. It’s a character-driven novel, where the focus is much less on the “what happens” to these people and more-so on the “what does what’s happening reveal about who they are”.

It’s a book about religion, about cheating, about sex, and about marijuana and other drugs.

Let’s get into it.

SPOILERS BELOW:

I feel as if there’s no way to discuss this book without going one character at a time, starting with Russ.

Russ is the first P.O.V. character, so that tells me that all of the things I’m about to discuss in regards to his family, start with him. Russ, from Chapter One, is a sexual deviant. Those words aren’t said by Franzen, but you feel it through the pages. Throughout the novel, he lusts after the recently widowed Frances Cottrell. He manipulates his role as minister to get close to her, using it as an excuse to spend time with her, and show her what a “good person” he is. He sleeps with her later on in the novel, notably when his son, Perry, is having an overdose.

(Characters cheating on their significant other counter: 1)

Marion, his wife, knows this about Russ. This novel has no mystery or suspense in regards to “Will Marion find out Russ is a sleezebag and cheating on her?” because Marion knows this from the first chapter she narrates. Russ doesn’t know she knows, but she does. And Marion has her own secrets and things she struggles with. We learn through her therapy sessions that, prior to meeting Russ, she had an affair with a married man, Bradley Grant, got pregnant with his child, had an abortion and a psychiatric breakdown.

(Characters cheating on their significant other counter: 2)

There is a scene in which Marion discusses being abused by a landlord Franzen only describes as “Satan”, who taunts her with the color red. He pays for her abortion in exchange for her giving herself to him, a deeply metaphorical but Doestoevsky-esque scene that will stick with me for a long while after reading this book.

Marion’s mental health is on the brink of collapse throughout the novel. This is often taken out on her children, notably Becky, who Marion seems to despise. She loves Perry, but despises Becky, and I’m not sure why. In regards to her marriage, it’s only after she finds Bradley Grant, many years later, and visits him that she realizes what she has. He is old, balding, gross, and divorced, and Marion realizes that her idea of him is better than the actual thing.

Dwight Gardner, New York Times reviewer, called Marion “one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but she was certainly the most interesting.

Clem, the oldest brother, is the character we probably see the least of in this novel, but he’s got so much of his father in him and could be looked at as arguably the worst of the whole bunch. He’s off at college at the start of the novel, and he finds a girlfriend named Sharon. Clem becomes, to put it mildly, obsessed with having sex with Sharon. So much so that he completely disregards his studies. I saw this as understandable for a college aged male and didn’t judge Clem too much for it, but his relationship with his eighteen-year-old sister, Becky, made me ick.

When Clem returns for college, he bombards his sister with his sex life, making her so uncomfortable she can’t stand to be around him. When she starts dating Tanner Evans (more on that later), Clem keeps asking her about sex, and she’s disgusted by it. In Becky’s P.O.V., Franzen writes that Clem talks to her like he “owns her”. It’s such a strange dynamic that I don’t even know what to say about it. There’s no cheating in this scenario, though the relationship with sex is stranger than ever.

Becky, the only Hildebrant daughter, thinks that she is a good person. I’d argue that the way Franzen writes her makes me think that he wants the reader to think she is. But Becky, like the rest of her family, is significantly flawed. At the start of the novel, she’s extremely superficial, caring so much about the way she’s perceived by her peers. It’s only when she meets the aforementioned Tanner Evans, that we start to see some of who she actually is. And yes, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Tanner has a girlfriend when Becky first starts to hook up with him.

(Characters cheating on their significant other counter: 3)

The wildest Becky moment comes when she decides to get high, in order to fit in and look cool amongst some of the other kids in Crossroads. She smokes marijuana for the first time, and after taking a few too many puffs, gets called out by Tanner’s girlfriend that she’s the girl he’s cheating with. She has a full blown panic attack, runs into the church attic, and amongst crosses and rosary beads, essentially begs God to make her not high anymore. In that moment, she “see’s God”, and becomes deeply religious for the rest of her life. It’s wild.

Ultimately, Tanner gets Becky pregnant and they have a daughter together. She ends the book estranged from her mother and father, after they take Perry’s side over her’s.

Speaking of Perry, there’s not a ton to say about him, outside of the fact that he is deeply, deeply egotistical. He’s a sixteen-year-old drug dealer, selling marijuana to the kids at school, but decides in the very beginning of the novel that he doesn’t want to do that anymore. He wants to be a better person.

He does not become a better person. Instead, things get worse. Not only does he speak badly about the people around him, but his desire to get high leads to an intense addiction to cocaine. When he talks about how it makes him feel, he literally says that he is God. To fuel his drug habit, he steals $6,000 worth of inheritance money from Becky and Clem and gets it stolen. He commits arson, overdoses, and cycles in and out of rehab under his parents care as the novel ends.

The thing about Perry that stood out most to me is how all the other characters around him just ignore his clear mental health issues and drug problem. Russ is too enamored with Frances Cottrell, Marion is dealing with her own past, Becky just wants to be cool and kiss Tanner, etc. The only one who spends any time with Perry is his younger brother, Judson. But Judson is too young to see it. Perry is the whole family’s tragedy. The fact that they let him get this far gone speaks to who they are as a whole familial unit.

Phew.

Now, with all of that being said, what do we make of all this?

I’ll start by adding that Jonathan Franzen is an incredible writer. What I just painted in ten paragraphs, he artfully constructs in over six hundred pages. This book dives into these characters’ lives so deeply, so intricately, so psychologically that you really do understand why they are all so awful.

As I read this book, it made me wonder, if we allowed someone like Jonathan Franzen unlimited access into our minds — to poke around and write fully and unfiltered about who we are and what we think, would people think that we are horrible people, too?

Does this kind of psychological work naturally lead to a summarization of wickedness? Because don’t we all just hide these awful parts of ourselves from the world? The parts that Franzen brought to life through the Hildebrants.

Don’t we all, on some level, crave sex, comfort, and connection — even if it leads us down selfish paths?

Just me? Sorry.

This novel is long, slow in parts, and absolutely suffocating in its emotional intimacy. That’s what makes it special, but also why I’m giving it four stars. Franzen doesn’t flinch from the parts of ourselves we like to hide, and that makes for both a difficult and illuminating read.

Before I go, it is worth noting that this is just the first of a trilogy that Franzen plans to write about this family, passing through time. I’m very interested to see where he goes next, whether it’s Judson’s adult life, Becky’s daughter, or somewhere else.

Thanks for reading. I’ll catch you in the next one.