Name: Allison Dempsey's review of Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Item: Crossroads
Rating: 4
Author: Allison Dempsey

Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. It’s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has veered into the era’s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the center. By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.

A Novel

Crossroads

A Key to All Mythologies (1)

sina (she/her) 

"No matter what I do, it's always me who's in the wrong. You're all saved, but apparently I'm damned. Do you think I enjoy being damned?" A sob of self-pity escaped him. "I'm doing the best I can!"

She was going to go to Los Angeles and flip the switch and see what happened. She would make herself visible, and she was defnitely going to murder someone. She just didn't know who.

"But l'm listening to you," Ambrose said, "and what l'm hearing is more like bragging. Is anyone else hearing that?" What Becky was hearing was more like statutory rape. 

Iris

Allison Dempsey

3.5 stars. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed reading this book, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive work of fiction (not least because Franzen was able to make each of the main characters so hateable in very precise ways).

Maurice FitzGerald

This is a good book
Franzen can write himself some decent prose.

Caroline

This is a book that is ‘a book’. It took a me a month to read in snippets during commute, before bed and on lunch. I did like it, it is well written and the characters are well rounded in a way that feels human. The god prose was a bit full on at times but I do think that is probably a sign of the time the novel was set on. I look forward to reading the sequel.

Took me some time to get into it, but once in, you really feel 'connected' to the characters. However, while the first and main part of the book takes place in one day, the second and shorter part covers months and even years, which just... took me some getting used to, after the slower pace in the beginning. 

Fraser Simons

Multiple pony-of-view story centering a family of Christian faith that interact with Crossroads, a group formed for the “hip”, new teens and their new (ostensibly) struggles, and the cross purposes of generations of different socialization generating internal and external drama.

Mostly my thoughts on this was: It works. The characters and believable. The dialogue is probably the bedrock, feeling organic and believable for every age group. I particularly admire that the individual belief structure is subjectively represented really well. Acting as a galvanizing force to create the best and worst qualities in the individual, and each unwilling to confront the aspect of their faith that incentivizes the terrible aspects of themselves they continually act out. Counterbalanced with their fostering of love and outreach in others who don’t oppose the catalysts of self-destruction, the characters feel fully fleshed out and nuanced. 

However, as much as every interaction feels organic. There does exist an over engineered quality to the fiction at a meta level. Even it’s messiness feels like a display. And so it was hard to do more to admire the story at a distance, rather than get immersed in it. Everything interlocks. And there are conceits that are contrived, but those become visibly necessary to the reader, adding to the artificial quality of the plotting. I bet most people wouldn’t mind this at all. It’s a subjective quibble but, I think why I was completely taken with it as others seem to be.

Cindy Lieberman

#49 in The 52 Book Club Challenge: Book title starts with the same letter as your first name. 

Of course that’s not why I read this hefty tome- part one of what will be 3 or more novels about a second-string, thirsting clergyman and his family in the fictional Chicago suburb of New Prospect. 

The apt title, Crossroads, refers both to a religious youth group program sponsored by the church and to the various times that each character was at a crossroads - morally, spiritually, or physically - a number of them coinciding on a particular Christmas Eve. 

Franzen has a knack for writing about the thoughts, contradictions, and motivations of his characters that bring them to life on the page. At least some of them. Sadly they are not particularly likeable characters, but they are human. And as we get to know them, after 500+ pages, we want to know what happens to them.

Donald

John-Paul Teti

PRE-ORDER NOW Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, Crossroads is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years

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Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

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