Crossroads

Crossroads is Jonathan Franzen's 2021 sixth novel, the structural return to form after Purity (2015) and the first volume of the projected three-book Key trilogy. The structural premise is the Hildebrandt family across the first months of 1971 in suburban Chicago - Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of First Reformed Church of New Prospect, his wife Marion who carries a secret pre-marriage past that the novel slowly reveals, his three older children (Clem the college sophomore, Becky the high-school junior, and Perry the high-school sophomore who is the structural genius and structural breakdown of the family), and the youngest son Judson. Crossroads is the name of the church youth group that Russ has been forced out of after a conflict with the younger associate pastor Rick Ambrose. The novel runs the family across the first months of 1971 and the broader Vietnam-era American Protestant-church social-and-political context.

Franzen's structural method is the patient ensemble construction across the five family members, with the close-third-person interiority across each character's individual chapters carrying the structural emotional weight. The Marion-back-history-and-Marion-present-tense chapters in the middle third (Marion's 1940s-and-1950s pre-marriage trauma and the slow reconstruction of her current marriage to Russ around what she has chosen not to tell him) are some of the strongest contemporary American literary fiction prose about a specific kind of mid-century-American Catholic-to-Protestant adult conversion and marriage. The Perry-and-Crossroads subplot is the structural emotional engine of the front half and the part that establishes the broader trilogy's structural arc. The novel reads in the patient maximalist American literary register Franzen has been refining across the past four decades; many critics consider Crossroads Franzen's structural masterwork.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural Franzen return to form and the first volume of the Key trilogy, and for fans of The Corrections, Freedom, and the broader contemporary American maximalist literary tradition. The David Pittu audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.