Crossroads (1)

Well, I did it. I read it – in, what, three days? Most of it on Saturday.

I’m going to agree with the rest of the world in saying that The Corrections hasn’t lost its position as Franzen’s best. Not even close.

Crossroads isn’t terrible, but to tell the truth, I spent a lot of time as I was reading wondering, why was this written now?

Which is not a good sign.

I went back and found my review of his 2010 novel Freedom…and I had similar thoughts about that one.

A plot summary (spoiler free!) from the America review of Crossroads.  

The story opens in New Prospect, a fictional Chicago suburb much like the one in which Franzen was born. It is two days before Christmas 1971, and the novel follows the fates of the Hildebrandt family, each on a quest for ill-conceived self-fulfillment.

The patriarch of the family is Russ, a local pastor at First Reformed Church who longs to regain his edge—and in the process to sleep with his congregation’s most eligible divorcee. His frustrated wife, Marion, wants either to lose some weight or her crippling need for self-control. The children aren’t doing any better: Their son Perry becomes convinced of his own damnation, daughter Becky is trying to get dreamy folk-rocker Tanner to break up with his girlfriend, and the college student Clem declines the student draft deferment because he believes it has made him as weak as his father.

The family’s frustrations and fears are deeply interwoven. Marion sees signs of her own youthful downfall in Perry’s increasingly drugged-out behavior. Clem’s unsettling attachment to his sister Becky colors his every decision, and her rejection of him leads ultimately to a rejection of her family. Russ still fumes over being kicked out of First Reformed Church’s youth group, Crossroads, an event that caused all his children to despise him in their own particular ways and has led to a years-long silent feud with the church’s youth pastor. Secrets are revealed, mistakes made and recouped; profound moments give way to base desires; and vice versa.

So we have this family tale, but also a tale of faith set in a particular historical moment.

Here’s an interview with Franzen in which he talks a bit about his purpose.

I think I’ll take a couple of posts to write about this novel. First, I’ll just skip through what I did and didn’t like about it, and then in the next post, I’ll take a closer look at the faith aspect.

As I mentioned before, I tend to like my fiction with more bite and humor than Franzen has to offer. There is gentle satire here and there are amusing moments and conversations, but they are rare. With Franzen, you get a lot of character excavation via dialogue and remembrance, and it’s generally pretty sincere and always very….complete.

So yes, this book is almost 600 pages long, although it does read fairly quickly. And who knows – could Franzen have accomplished what he was after at a shorter length? No idea. But I will say that his structure and the length does make the book a little hard to follow at times, in this respect:

First, know that about 2/3 of the book takes place during about a 24-hour period, on December 23, 1971. We’re brought into these character’s lives one at a time, as each has certain experiences or encounters and does a lot of remembering of the past during that experience. It does alert us to the richness and depth of individual experience, but it also can have the effect of driving what the character was originally about deep into the memory hole after a couple dozen pages of background. Okay…got it..what was she doing in the first place, again?

But, of course, that could just be my problem (although did see it mentioned in at least one review.)

The structure that worked beautifully for Franzen before feels herky-jerky in Crossroads, with each shift in perspective stalling the book’s momentum. 

I’m also not a fan of Franzen’s portrayal of most women here. First, one of his female characters is described not solely, but extensively, in terms of her weight, with which both she and her husband are dissatisfied – she weighs…144 pounds.  I mean – Franzen, maybe you should move out of California. Unless Marion’s four feet tall….that’s not “fat.” And even then.

The same character has had extensive mental health issues in the past – an important thematic point, as it ties generations together – but something about the whole scenario struck me as wrong and slightly misogynist. I’m not sure why – for Marion’s therapist does, indeed, note this and wonder why Marion blames her mother, her sister and herself for all of her problems and never the men who have actually caused her great harm. So perhaps I’m wrong to clock this. But still – the “crazy, supersexed, smart-as-a-whip wildcat” is just as tiresome a stereotype to me as the manic magic pixie girl. Same thing, slightly different vibe.

Okay, here’s what I did like:

Various observations and turns of phrase. Descriptions that can be poetic and absolutely on the nose. Affecting accounts of religious faith. Painfully accurate recounting of the dynamics of churches, both among members and among staff.

And passages like this, descriptive and poignant:

Perry had run up the stairs. Huffing, with poisoned heart, she followed him to the third-floor storage room. No guilty secrets were buried here. She’d arrived at her uncle Jimmy’s with only one suitcase, and before she married Russ she’d burned her diaries in Jimmy’s fireplace, destroying the last evidence of the person she’d been. The oldest relics now were from Indiana – a crib and a high chair last used by Judson, an old movie projector, a cedar chest of blankets and linens not worth keeping, a wardrobe of fashions unlikely to return, a mildewed army-surplus tent that Russ had wrongly imagined the family might camp in. It was all just sadness.

And most of all, a knowing and patient of family dynamics – Franzen’s expertise – exploring why we do what we do, and how much of it is not much more than reactive stubbornness and a conviction that in order to be who I want to be in the world, I first have to demonstrate, by any means possible, no matter how foolish or harmful, that I am definitely not them.

We’ve seen that work out in his accounts of our attempt to correct the mistakes of our forbearers, to find freedom from their constraints, and here – to make choices that we hope are good, but we know for sure are fraught. At a crossroads. Of course.

From that Vulture review – this would be my conclusion, as well:

It is demonstrably possible for a novelist to write about dreary characters without producing dreary text, but too many of the Hildebrandt family are boring in exactly the same way: stubborn, narrow, flummoxed, risk averse. Where are their minds? With the exception of Marion and Perry — the designated lunatics — it is an impalpable family. Those sections are revelatory, combustible, and funny, and when I rounded onto them I could hardly stop myself from fist-pumping and yelping, “Franzen’s back, baby!” And then Russ or his loins or one of his other two children would plod around, with their turnips and their long johns and their self-pity, and my resting heart rate would reinstate itself.

I will say this, though – circling back to my review of Freedom back in the day. Something, at least, has changed:

Franzen’s theme in both of his novels is, essentially, that there’s no use.  One generation’s attempts to “correct” the previous one are not only misguided but damaging.  The “freedom” our restless selves seek, our necks craning for a better view of the greenery on the other side, is equally self-deceptive, for in the end we end up right where we began.

It’s interesting because it’s a rather conservative message, isn’t it? And I don’t mean “conservative” politically, I just mean – conservative, as in staying put, in not straining for change.  It’s also tinged with a bit of hopelessness as we just race in our circles chasing illusions, pointlessly trying to fix our unfixable lives.

What renders this ultimately uninteresting to me is that the characters aren’t butting up against anything more than themselves and each other.  What I said about The Corrections applies here – big book, small story. Both novels feature idealists, but they are idealists whose causes are irrelevant, interchangeable.  There’s no transcendent, even incipient or glinting at the edges, nothing greater out there. 

Now. Considering that Crossroads is, in great part, about faith and religion, perhaps we finally have that bigger picture at work?

Let’s see….