The Church of Jonathan Franzen

A rabbi, a preacher, and a drug dealer walk into a Christmas party. This is not the setup to a joke; it is the setup to a pivotal scene in “Crossroads,” Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The drug dealer is Perry, the fifteen-year-old son of Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of the First Reformed Church of New Prospect, Illinois. That makes him a P.K., or preacher’s kid, a famously fraught identity that some people navigate by striving to be good enough to live up to the accompanying expectations, and others by becoming conspicuously, defiantly bad. When we first meet Perry, he is stranded between the two options: brilliant but troubled, he has lately resolved to quit doing drugs, be nicer to his sister, and generally become a better person, but he is finding the whole idea of goodness difficult to comprehend.

At the party—an annual interfaith affair for the religious leaders of New Prospect—he convinces himself, through a brief bargaining session with his better angels, that drinking is not technically a contravention of his resolution, then covertly helps himself to a generous amount of gløgg, the potent Scandinavian drink on offer. While the booze works its way into his system, he strikes up a conversation with a rabbi and a pastor about a question that is much on his mind: whether an action can be considered good if the actor knows that by taking it he will gain either pleasure or advantage. Is a godly man truly good if “he enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life”? Is Perry himself good if he can’t stop his busy mind from tallying up the ancillary benefits of doing the right thing? The rabbi and the pastor are pleasantly surprised that a teen-ager is interested in such morally substantive matters, but the hostess, familiar with Perry and therefore suspicious of him, tries to steer him away from the clergy. Perry, blood alcohol surging, promptly explodes; as the party falls silent, his mother steps into the room. “This is what I’m talking about,” he exclaims. “No matter what I do, it’s always me who’s in the wrong.” Drunk, desperate, ashamed, he bursts into tears, and into the only apologia available to him: “I’m doing the best I can!”

Perry is not the only character in “Crossroads” who is struggling to understand the nature of virtue. The Hildebrandt family occupies a milieu—churchgoing, suburban, Midwestern—in which worth is measured according to “the all-important niceness spectrum,” niceness being that quality Perry fears: a simulacrum of goodness that may or may not have its substance. Within this milieu, Russ is known for being upstanding, and his wife, Marion, for being “Very Nice,” but both of them, together with three of their four children, are doing some notably Not Nice things.

This distinction between real and ersatz virtue is the central preoccupation of “Crossroads”—so much so that Franzen, who historically wears his thematic concerns on his dust sleeve (“Freedom,” “Purity,” “The Corrections”), might have titled this new novel “Goodness,” if the word didn’t double as an awkward exclamation. It is true that “Crossroads” is also concerned, like every Franzen novel, with the makeup and the breakdown of American families. And it is concerned, too, with the issues implied by the title he gave it: those moments in the lives of individuals and in the history of a nation when stark choices with permanent consequences must be made. But, deliberately and otherwise, the book returns again and again to the same question: What does it mean—for a person and, in a different sense, for a novel—to be good?

“Crossroads” is structured chronologically, around the liturgical calendar, and opens in the season of Advent. But Russ Hildebrandt is not waiting to celebrate the birth of his Saviour. He is waiting for an opportunity to convert his adulterous feelings for Frances Cottrell, a pretty young widow in his congregation, into an actual affair.

Raised Mennonite and still devoted to God and at least nominally to family, Russ is not a serial philanderer; Marion was his first love and remains the only woman he has ever slept with. But, twenty-five years and four children later, time—which, for the families in a Franzen novel, is almost always a corrosive rather than an adhesive force—has worn their marriage away to a dull cycle of aversion and routine, and his eye has lately wandered. Marion knows this, but she also knows what Russ does not: that lurking behind their relationship is a lie she told at its very beginning, and lurking behind that lie is the conviction that she is a fundamentally bad person, one who deserves forgiveness from neither her husband nor her God.

The Hildebrandts, in other words, are a nuclear family chiefly in the fissile sense, rendered unstable and explosive by reactive elements at the core. Only the youngest, Judson, seems (at first) unscathed by this ambient volatility; at nine years old, he is still possessed of a kind of Rousseauian purity. Not so the eldest child, Clem, lately deflowered and on his way back from college to inform his parents that he has dropped out, given up his deferment, and notified the local draft board that he is ready to ship out to Vietnam. His sister, Becky, the social queen of her high school, is newly in love, newly interested in Jesus, and on the verge of thwarting every expectation that anyone ever had for her future. As for Perry, the second youngest: Clem ignores him, Judson worships him, Marion believes that he is a genius while worrying that he has inherited her family’s troubled genes, and Russ, who fears Perry’s intellect, generally tries to avoid him. That leaves Becky with—in her opinion—the only clear-eyed view of her younger brother: as an expert manipulator, too slick by half, with a surfeit of brains and a deficit of soul. But Perry himself shares her view, though he is unsure whether he is responsible for his faults or has been condemned by fate to being an “evil, selfish worm.” Either way, he believes that he is intrinsically bad, as Marion believes that she is—in contrast to Russ and Becky, who remain convinced of their own fundamental goodness, no matter what they actually do.

Thus do the Hildebrandts enter the Christmas season of 1971. The events of that season and those which follow are told by Franzen, a master of free indirect discourse, via a series of baton handoffs among the five older members of the family. What we learn from Russ sets the stage for the intramarital and intergenerational breakdown to come: three years earlier, he suffered a grand “humiliation” in which he was ousted—in his telling, owing to excess piety and insufficient hipness—from the youth group at First Reformed. That group is called Crossroads—a name with just the right degree of clever-hokey Christian plausibility. It is now led by Russ’s nemesis, the adored youth pastor, Rick Ambrose, under whose guidance it has become vaguely cultlike: low on recognizable Christianity, high on the repeated baring of adolescent souls. Its members speak “from the heart,” offer one another “strokes” for affirmation, sing along to the strumming of acoustic guitars, and gather around a single candle flame to share their feelings.

Much of this world will be familiar to readers of “The Discomfort Zone,” a 2006 collection of essays (some of which appeared in this magazine), in which Franzen describes his youthful participation in a similar organization. And indeed the depiction of Crossroads has the uncomfortable accuracy, simultaneously comic and cringeworthy, of a particularly unfortunate childhood photograph. But one can as easily mine one’s past for clay as for gold, and at first glance the goings on at a Christian youth group in the nineteen-seventies seem less like the stuff of serious literary fiction than like the premise of the newest movie from Christopher Guest.

As it turns out, though, Crossroads is classic Franzen fodder: a slice of suburban life ripe not for satire but for the far deadlier scrutiny that comes from taking it seriously. He shows us the group as it is experienced by his characters, each of whom grants it outsized importance. For Clem, Crossroads matters because he was present for Russ’s humiliation and promptly lost all respect for him. For Becky, it matters partly because joining a Christian youth group is a morally unimpeachable way of rejecting her father, and partly because she was encouraged to join by the young man with whom she has fallen in love: Tanner Evans, an aspiring musician whose band is a Crossroads mainstay. For the addiction-prone Perry, who grasps that, in the economy of the group, “public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval,” it matters because he craves that approval like a drug.

Ultimately, this oozy adolescent experience is no less important to the two grownup Hildebrandts. For Russ, Crossroads matters because, having semi-reconciled with Ambrose, he has invited himself along on the group’s annual service trip to a Navajo reservation in Arizona, where he hopes to seduce Frances, one of the trip’s parent chaperones. For Marion, it matters because, while Russ is away, she plans to visit an old flame in Los Angeles and commit a little adultery of her own.

That service trip, which takes place during spring break, advances the time line of “Crossroads” from Advent to Eastertide, and propels the Hildebrandts from mere dysfunction to outright disaster. Yet despite that catastrophe, and earlier ones in the history of Marion Hildebrandt, “Crossroads” does not offer a theodicy—an explanation of why a benevolent and all-powerful God would permit the existence of suffering. Franzen is not interested, here, in why bad things happen to good people. He is interested in why people perceive themselves as good or bad, often despite ample evidence to the contrary, and why people who are at least intermittently trying to be good do terrible things.

These questions are among the fundamental concerns of moral philosophy, but they are also some of the oldest preoccupations of fiction, which was once far more overtly concerned with goodness than it is today. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels are full of naïve young protagonists striking off on journeys of ethical maturation, and omniscient narrators opining on virtue and meting out reward or punishment to characters based on their moral worth. Novels were judged in part on their promotion of rectitude—“Madame Bovary” caused a scandal because Flaubert failed to explicitly condemn the adultery he depicted—and authors, accordingly, used their work as vehicles for advancing ethical ideals. Consider Dickens, making the case again and again for selflessness over greed, or Austen, parsing the distinctions between dignity and vanity, discernment and snobbery, amiability and ingratiation—those everyday virtues, at times almost indistinguishable from manners, that make sharing one’s life with others either pleasant or insufferable.

Eventually, this tradition waned, partly because of the rise of modernism, with its greater interest in consciousness than in conscience, and partly because of increasing skepticism toward conventional notions of goodness. But Franzen is an admirer and an inheritor of this earlier mode of the novel, and he nods to it in his new one. “Crossroads” is the first volume in a trilogy called “A Key to All Mythologies,” a title he borrowed from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” perhaps the most deft and persuasive work to emerge from the long history of fiction as an instrument of moral instruction. The original “Key to All Mythologies” was an omnibus treatise on world religions, destined to remain unfinished, that was the life’s work of the dreary old clergyman Edward Casaubon, who marries the book’s moral and actual heroine: the much younger Dorothea Brooke, who realizes too late that his mind is no match for his ambition.

Given that the phrase “Key to All Mythologies” is now inseparably associated with misguided and unrealized ambition, it’s unclear, in Volume I, why Franzen has decided to use it. Presumably he is not just winking at his Casaubon-like status in certain corners of literary culture: cranky, condescending, out of touch, always at work on that other impossible achievement, the Great American Novel. Nor are there any obvious literary progeny of “Middlemarch” here, though Marion, like Dorothea, is markedly smarter, more socially astute, and more theologically sophisticated than her husband, and has faithfully rewritten his sermons throughout their marriage.

What seems most likely is that the reference is meant to draw our attention to the fatal limitations of totalizing theories of religion or anthropology—of any attempt to unify the wildly varied ways that people justify their actions, measure their own worth, and make sense of existence. In the course of Franzen’s novel, we watch the Hildebrandts pursue such different means of doing all this that they collectively reflect the fracturing of any kind of shared understanding of virtue in modern life. Marion tries psychotherapy; Clem rejects introspection in favor of action; Russ turns to volunteer work; Becky experiments with romantic love and love of God; and Perry tries logical deduction, will power, and cocaine.

None of these efforts are particularly successful—but then, with the exception of the cocaine, none of them are wholly unsuccessful, either. Franzen is not Dickens, which I mean here as a compliment; he does not do moral pageantry, doling out impossible quantities of virtue to some characters while withholding it entirely from others. Instead, in “Crossroads,” the desire to be good is broadly shared but alarmingly ephemeral, dissolving with equal ease in the face of forces as potent as addiction (for Perry), as insidious as self-pity (for Russ), and as trivial as a traffic jam (for Marion). Yet it is also strangely persistent, readily rekindled by an encounter with another person, an experience of the ineffable, or the banked heat of some mysterious inner fire. This combination of fragility and tenacity renders the old-fashioned question of virtue interesting again, by rendering it suspenseful. Like real people, the characters in the book go to therapy every week and attend worship services every weekend because their will to be good is in constant need of renewal, which is to say that it is in constant jeopardy.

If this were the only question about goodness animating “Crossroads”—basically, “Will it prevail?”—the novel would be old-fashioned indeed, and also almost certainly not by Jonathan Franzen. What makes the book distinctly part of his canon, with its ambient atmosphere of self-absorption, self-loathing, and disaffection, is not the question of whether virtue can triumph but the meta-question that Perry asks: Does real goodness even exist, or is it always compromised by the dividends it pays to the do-gooder?

To ethicists, that is a question about whether right thinking matters more than right action—that is, whether we should judge people’s goodness based on what they are doing or on why they are doing it. Most of them agree that motives matter: in a perfect world, we would all do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. But we don’t, and Franzen repeatedly exploits the gap between what we do and why we do it—which, in fiction, is the gap between plot and character. Many of the book’s crises are set into motion by allegedly high-minded decisions: Becky shares an unexpected financial windfall with her siblings; Clem gives up his deferment to keep someone from a less privileged background from taking his place in Vietnam; Russ, in his youth, leaves a cushy administrative job to help out on a Navajo reservation. Yet we know that Becky is not so much generous as invested in feeling superior; that Clem wants to spite his father, a former conscientious objector who opposes the current war; and that Russ’s volunteer work has long been more helpful to him than to its intended beneficiaries.

Do these motives matter to the rest of the story? You can imagine. In the end, the ostensibly good acts in “Crossroads” are only slightly less disastrous than the overtly bad ones, and virtue seems less like a living possibility than like a trap or a phantasm. There is no Dorothea here, no steadfast moral center to rouse our admiration. Instead, the most generous take on human nature to be found within “Crossroads,” and the final summation of all its characters, might be that desperate claim Perry makes at the Christmas party, rendered strikingly pitiable by how sincere it is, and how little it avails: “I’m doing the best I can!”

It would be a mistake to conclude, from all this talk of virtue, that “Crossroads” is a solemn book. It is, on the contrary, a breezily written family drama with plenty of plot and a touch of melodrama; on the map of literary culture, it shares a border with the beach read. As befits a novel of middle-class suburban life, its crises are insular: a kid isn’t living up to his potential, a woman is unhappy about her weight, a teen-ager has a crush on someone else’s boyfriend. Even the Vietnam backdrop bows to this insistent banality: by 1972, the war is beginning to wind down, and the draft board isn’t interested in Clem, who ends up going to Louisiana and working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

These everyday stakes are not a problem; most of life is banal unless it is happening to you. But some part of Franzen—the part that believes in social novels and novels of ideas, and, no doubt, also the grimacing pessimist of his nonfiction, who feels so much despair for the state of the world—is forever turning outward, toward the grand sweep of history and the prevailing customs and troubles of our era. Sometimes his attempts to square those two scales are successful. Without manipulation or overreach, he nicely instantiates in the characters of “Crossroads” a series of larger phenomena: the generational fraying of the nineteen-sixties and seventies; the emergence of women’s liberation, slightly too late for Marion’s cohort of mid-century mothers and wives; the way mainstream Protestantism lost traction with young people precisely by its eagerness to retain them (Rick Ambrose, defending the absence of anything identifiably Christian in his youth group, weakly observes that, “obviously, the hope is that everyone will find their way to an authentic faith”); and, especially, the particular kinds of trouble that befall suburban Wasps whose lives have everything but meaning.

Moreover, in a first for Franzen, whose characters of color have historically been few and dreadful, the extreme discomfort of scenes set on Chicago’s South Side reads less like authorial limitation than like literary realism. Russ, in his volunteer work there, displays the awkward mix of self-consciousness, self-congratulation, and obliviousness emblematic of white liberals struggling to reconcile their awareness of racial inequality with their sense of themselves as the good guys. And, to the bit part of a Black preacher, Franzen grants an interiority not interested in sharing itself with Russ, and an external reality, in the form of pastoral obligations, that the white volunteers are just as likely to complicate as to improve—another, more fraught iteration of the question of whether our intentions or our actions matter more when we try to do the right thing.

Sometimes, though, Franzen’s outward impulse leads him away from his own strengths. At heart, the human scale to which he is most acutely attuned is the familial—taken together, his novels amount to one long elaboration on the theme of Every Unhappy Family Is Unhappy in Its Own Way—and the forces he channels best are centripetal: he is at his finest when writing about the Midwest, the middle class, midlife crises, middlingness in general. The farther he ventures from all that, the shakier his plots become, the less organically they arise from his characters. Thus the otherwise effective spring-break trip is marred by a secondary tragedy on the Navajo reservation involving strip mining, which seems imported less from Arizona than from “Freedom,” where it didn’t work, either. Similarly, toward the end of “Crossroads,” Clem vanishes to rural Peru, for no reason except that Franzen routinely sends one character per book on an ill-advised adventure in a developing nation, in service to some woes-of-globalism subplot. In such moments, the characters seem subservient to a set of ideas, which is the problem with Clem more generally: his fall from diligent student to aimless drifter is less a plausible personal trajectory than a convenient embodiment of the generational archetype of the dropout. Even Judson feels more like a real person, despite having almost no role in the book beyond quietly absorbing his family’s trauma.

That lacuna is effective, in that it makes the reader look forward to hearing from the youngest Hildebrandt in the rest of the trilogy. Elsewhere, though, the spectre of those future novels does not serve the current one as well. In general, Franzen is good at endings; a surprising feature of his writing, given how consumed it is with dysfunction and disaffection, is how regularly it finds its way toward tenderness in the final pages. But the pacing is off at the end of “Crossroads.” Although most of the book lingers on just a handful of days during Christmastime of 1971 and Holy Week of 1972, its final stretch feels rushed. A couple of years pass with no more than a summary of the momentous events that filled them, and the conclusion is really just a cliffhanger; the novel does not so much end as trade on our knowledge that the story itself is far from over.

Yet here is the thing about “Crossroads”: when I got to that unsatisfying ending, I found myself irritated less by its shortcomings than by the fact that I couldn’t read those other volumes right away. The experience brought to mind E. M. Forster’s maxim about the novel: “Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.”

By that metric, “Crossroads” plainly succeeds—yet that metric does not distinguish Jonathan Franzen from James Patterson. Still, the two are plainly distinct, which raises the question of what, other than suspense, makes Franzen’s new novel so compelling. That’s tricky to answer, because what’s true of ethics is also true of aesthetics: certain forms of goodness are strangely elusive. And Franzen, more than most contemporary writers of his calibre, operates in this covert mode almost exclusively. In the years since the publication of “The Corrections,” his prose has grown looser and laxer; never a showy author, he now sometimes scarcely seems like a good one. He has become so assertively styleless that he appears to have deemed linguistic pleasure not only inferior to but anathema to all other literary aims. Whole chapters—almost whole books—go by without a beautiful line or an arresting image. Yet I still remember the description, from “The Corrections,” of thunderstorms piling up across the Midwest—“like big spiders in a little jar”—and I miss the writer who conjured that vision. Unlike Perry, in other words, Franzen does not always seem to be doing the best he can. That impression is enhanced by the unmistakable fact that, from time to time, he towers above his own work. I don’t just mean that “The Corrections” was the best of his novels; I mean that at some point within each novel he demonstrates the full, showstopping range of what he is capable of doing.

These bursts of excellence take two forms, the first having to do with his characters. Not all of them are convincing, although I’ve never agreed with the claim that Franzen is bad at writing women. (Yes, all the female characters in “Freedom” are weak, but so are all the men.) But when he does succeed with characters he succeeds dramatically, lighting up their inner lives, in the manner of police stations and emergency rooms, with accurate, unflattering fluorescence. Think of Enid, the matriarch of “The Corrections,” who presides over her difficult husband’s decline into dementia while desperately yearning for one more family Christmas with her adult children gathered together in their childhood home. She is needy, maddening, familiar, sharp, utterly consistent, in urgent relationship with the constraints of her gender, her marriage, and her era, and, all told, one of the truly great creations of twenty-first-century literature.

In “Crossroads,” the standout characters are Becky, Perry, and Marion. We watch Becky’s moral formation almost in real time—under the triple influences of newfound piety, a narcissistic aunt, and her family’s sudden implosion—and the result is flatly terrifying. By the end of the book, she appears to have turned to ice, complete with an inner Zamboni to keep her maximally smooth; nothing can mar her perfect self-righteousness, and it is to Franzen’s great credit that she made my skin crawl to a degree usually achievable only by someone from whom you have repeatedly walked away fuming. Perry, meanwhile, is terrifying in a different way: we are scared not of him but for him. A teen-age drug addict with a troubled mind, a grave lack of adult oversight, and ruinous instincts, he is headed for disaster from the beginning, yet I can think of no other character in the Franzen universe who receives such tender treatment.

Together with Marion, Perry also illuminates the second of Franzen’s erratic but astonishing gifts, which is for the creation of the perfect set piece. There is at least one of these in almost all the novels—a moment when some inner gear shifts dramatically upward and we are delivered into a stretch of literature transcendent in its wonderfulness. In “The Corrections,” that moment comes when Chip, in childhood, is left alone at the dining-room table until he finishes his dinner. All around him, the other members of the family retreat to their various corners of the house, his mother willfully and his father accidentally forgetting about him, while time simultaneously slows to a crawl, reduced to Chip’s microscopic contemplation of the pattern on a placemat and the ancient boogers stuck to the underside of the table, and stretches forward indefinitely into the future—because, as Franzen understands, once you have sat alone at age seven in front of a plate of cold liver and mashed rutabaga for long enough, some part of you will be sitting there for the rest of your life.

That scene is representative of what makes these set pieces work: it combines maximum insight into a character’s psychology with maximum narrative reach, both spatial and temporal—a different kind of successful squaring of scales. In “Crossroads,” the analogous scene with Marion lasts for sixty pages and is set in a therapist’s office, a convenient place for both elongating time and accessing interiority. In the course of it, we learn what her therapist, interestingly, does not: as a very young woman, she had an affair with a married man that resulted in a psychotic break, a pregnancy, and an abortion, which she could afford only through a bargain so Faustian that she sincerely describes its purveyor as Satan.

It is difficult to know which is more gripping: this backstory or Marion’s take on it, which is shaped by the potency of her belief in guilt and sin. Her insistence that she is responsible for some of the terrible things that have happened to her dismays her therapist, who suggests, predictably, that she should forgive herself and feel angry at the perpetrators instead. But Marion, who does not regard anger as benign, is refreshingly unpersuaded: “I know you think it’s sick to blame myself, but spiritually I think it’s healthier.” Gradually, we learn that the litany of things for which she blames herself tracks backward along a dark red line from Perry’s fragile mind all the way to her father’s long-ago suicide. And all the while Becky is heading to a Crossroads concert to publicly declare her love to Tanner Evans, Perry is taking Judson to that ill-fated Christmas party, and Russ, who should be at the party as well, is getting into a fender bender in the increasingly heavy snow with his would-be mistress beside him in the car.

Three hundred more pages and thirty years elapse before Marion’s crisis is echoed by another, and we watch as Perry, now in the grips of a full-blown addiction, descends into catastrophe in the Arizona desert. Franzen’s narrative dexterity is never more evident in the book than in the widening chasm between Perry’s inner experience and what we see happening to him there, and the resulting story line is the opposite of Clem’s: meticulously constructed, emotionally convincing, simultaneously suspenseful and inevitable. But it is also successful for a subtler reason. A breakdown in the past, a breakdown in the present; two parents each abandoning a child in order to pursue an affair; a climactic week unfolding with exact, unforced choreography across multiple time zones and six family members: it turns out that “Crossroads,” which reads so speedily it can seem almost slapdash, is carefully wrought, its neatly balanced architecture another clandestine source of its power.

“Crossroads” is an imperfect novel that is nonetheless a great one, its inner operations lofting it high above its flaws. Only the rest of the trilogy can tell us whether the same will hold for any of its characters. Throughout the book, Franzen fixes his gaze on bad decisions, bad faith, the incremental setting in motion of disaster. Ultimately, though, he seems more invested in what happens after all those calamitous choices are made—in their practical consequences but also in who offers forgiveness and who withholds it when the will to be good has failed. The deepest form of suspense at work in his novel is driven not by its plot but by a kind of moral uncertainty. At its conclusion, almost every character is at his or her worst; the question it leaves us with is whether any of them can ever be better. ♦