Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Rosemary Goring: a mesmerising tale of unhappy families

4th Estate, £20

Review by Rosemary Goring

If an epigraph were required for Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, he need have looked no further than Tolstoy’s dictum that, while all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. As Franzen is well aware, the family unit offers novelists infinite possibilities, especially when they are as dysfunctional and disengaged as the Hildebrandts. They are to Crossroads what the Oblonskys were to Anna Karenin.

The first of a projected trilogy, titled A Key to All Mythologies – a nod to George Eliot’s Middlemarch – it opens shortly before Christmas, 1971. The US is still at war in Vietnam but enthusiasm is waning even among hawks. In New Prospect, a small, well-to-do, satellite of Chicago, there is the “moist promise” of snow. Paterfamilias Russ Hildebrandt, a Protestant pastor at the First Reformed church, is doing his rounds, visiting the bedridden and the senile and dropping off toys and canned staples to those on the breadline. It is something to which he is looking forward, not least because it will allow him to spend hours in the company of a woman who is not his wife.

Thus, at the outset of 580 hectic pages, alarm – rather than jingle – bells begin to ring. Russ, like so many men of his vintage, is suffering from an acute case of midlife crisis. Nor is he alone; his overweight, neglected spouse Marion is spilling all to a psychiatrist. Meanwhile their four children are to a lesser or greater degree behaviourally challenged. The Hildebrandts’ version of unhappiness is replicated across a continent in which people – children especially – find it difficult to relate to fellow human beings. Never mind families being unhappy in their own way, so are individuals. Among the Hildebrandts, there is no unity in their misery; each of its members has a mighty cross to bear.

Readers of Franzen, and especially his third novel, The Corrections, will recognise the scenario. Published two decades ago, it tracked the travails of the Lamberts as they attempted to come to terms with a father’s failing health. It, too, took place at Christmas when families are supposed to come together but when often they splinter. What hope for peace on earth when peace around the hearth is so hard to come by.

As events proceed, Russ and Marion, Clem, Becky and Perry are all given the opportunity to perform solo. Only the youngest, nine-year-old Judson, is kept on the periphery, an observer rather than a participant. Far into the novel, his mother asks what’s making him unhappy and eventually he tells her that Perry, seven years his senior, has told him that he is sick of him. But that’s okay, says Judson. “I hate him, too.” Doubtless we will hear from him in the promised sequels.

For the moment, though, one reads Crossroads with the kind of dread with which we watch thrillers that open with a labradoodle being taken for its morning walk in a still-dark wood. Flitting deftly from real to past time, Franzen meticulously constructs set pieces in which pure comedy collides with excruciating embarrassment. One such example is when Clem attends a Christmas party hosted by the church’s senior minister. On his own, and believing he is unobserved, he throws down a couple of drinks and ends up haranguing his hosts in a scene that makes you wince with pleasure.

The novel is named after Robert Johnson’s blues song that was popularised in the late 1960s by Cream. Crossroads is a church youth group that has become “cool” because of its leader, long-haired Rick Ambrose. In contrast, Russ prefers the uncool, authentic Johnson original, which is Franzen’s way of alienating him from the bolshie teenagers who flock to Ambrose as if to a Messiah. This will lead ultimately to Russ’s “humiliation” at the hands of two girls who tear mercilessly into him on a spring trip. He is so affected by this that he feels he must abandon Crossroads and re-evaluate his life, which is at least something he has in common with his wife and children.

The bones of the novel are to be found in Franzen’s 2006 memoir, The Discomfort Zone. As he related there, he was a member of a group called Fellowship which, like Crossroads, had “no definite article, no modifier”. It, too, was associated with a church and had a charismatic leader, a badly behaved boy turned good, who talked frankly about sex and irreverently about Jesus and his miracles. Franzen wanted desperately to be part of the in-crowd but, as with Russ, it did not sit easily with him.

In Crossroads he describes a generation that is less in awe of authority, and relaxed about rebellion. They have sex, peddle drugs, smoke, drink, curse, and challenge received wisdoms. Some of the book’s most powerful passages, however, dwell on Marion’s past and her mental instability, about which she has told Russ nothing. Once “a seriously practising Catholic”, she has come to see this as a phase when she was overwhelmed “by the significance of insignificant things”, and was paranoid that God was watching everything she did.

God here, however, is Jonathan Franzen, whose omniscience allows him to drill into his characters’ heads and minds and monitor their every action. In so doing, we follow him like star-struck disciples mesmerised by the force of his narrative. Just occasionally he missteps or overreaches, as when he describes Clem posting a letter which could lead to him being sent to Vietnam: “The throat of the mailbox made a rusty-jointed gulp as the letter went down.” For the most part, though, he writes sentences that are as addictive as opioids. I was reminded of the Rabbit and Bascombe sagas of John Updike and Richard Ford – a high bar – both of which used families as the prism through which to view America in the 20th century. To them, we may in time add the unhappy Hildebrandts, whom we leave at Easter still standing at the crossroads waiting – as in the song – for a ride to who knows where.