The unearned self-assurance that resides there isn’t, for him, a reason to neglect it.
Review: Miriam Toews’ wise, wonderful 'Fight Night' celebrates three generations of womenīut in prior novels “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” Franzen took an ironic approach to Midwestern suburbia.
To critics, he’s an anachronism – a chronicler of trite paternalism and a faded middle-class social order. By contrast, their teenage sister, Becky, discovers pot and finds God.įranzen’s career-long fixation with writing hefty novels about white-bread nuclear families has a way of making the Twitterati’s eyes roll faster than the reels of a slot machine. (The novel is set in 19.) His brother Perry is drifting into drug abuse for want of a religious center. Their eldest son, Clem, has given up his Vietnam War student deferment in a rash fit of moral recalibration. His wife, Marion, feels old unspoken traumas resurfacing. Russ, a pastor in the Chicago suburbs, feels his faith evaporating as he pursues a widowed member of his flock. Just about everybody in Jonathan Franzen’s superb domestic epic “Crossroads” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 592 pages, ★★★★ out of four) is dealing with a serious spiritual crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.Watch Video: Cynthia Erivo’s moment: new album, new children’s book With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.Ī tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads, Franzen explores the history of a generation. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father.Ĭlem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago.
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