Franzen explores this struggle through Marion, whose life before Russ involved a self-destructive pursuit of a married man, and Perry, whose intellect seems destined to doom him. The other family members similarly use religion to either rationalize their actions or make themselves abject. At one point he revels in “the sweetness of being thrown upon God’s mercy: of making himself so alone and so wretched that only God could love him.” Russ’ mood wobbles from prideful to self-pitying. Through interlocking character studies, Franzen unearths not just Russ’ middle-aged lusts but their connection to his failing grip on his flock, particularly the youth group, Crossroads, that a fellow pastor has elbowed him out of. Review: Miriam Toews’ wise, wonderful 'Fight Night' celebrates three generations of women 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 crossroads