Crossroads By Jonathan Franzen (2021)
In my feeble effort to keep up with the contemporary novel (I’ve read 9 titles out of Goodreads Top 25 of the 21st century) I’ve read more Jonathan Franzen novels, four, than anybody else who shows up on such lists. (One more than Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for what it’s worth.) But I’m hardly any kind of Franzen fan boy or completist. I don’t know his first two novels, for instance, and have barely touched his essays and various other commentaries and controversies.
A friend tells me there’s a lot of hate for Franzen on social media. I’m assuming most of that is because he’s a relatively popular environment-friendly liberal intellectual and so a target of the anti-woke mob Bro culture that trolls the interwebs but I might have that wrong. I’m generally very out of touch with the contemporary conversation.
I know after his first breakout book, The Corrections (2001), he had a run-in with the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah’s Book Club picked Franzen’s book but then rescinded the honor when Franzen complained in an interview he was afraid Oprah’s recognition would discourage the male readership he wanted to reach. His supporting evidence for this fear, weird and funny in retrospect, was about how at events he attends to speak and sign books men are coming up to him and telling him that the Oprah book recommendation turned them off. Consider this reader for a moment: A man interested in literary fiction in the 21st century who will only read novels recommended by men or is that hostile to Oprah?! Why? Because she champions Toni Morrison and so threatens the male domination of the literary canon, perhaps? I know this is pre-Me Too early 2000s but this was still that much of a thing, really?
Reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s talk about the androgynous mind in the creative arts; everyone is a non-binary composite Man-woman or Woman-man, and creative energy flows out of a stable balance (not perfect equality) in our natural doubled genderness. To Woolf, and she’s riffing on some Thomas Carlyle I don’t know, writers can be too masculine or feminine, although the latter she thought had been twisted and suppressed from expressing much of an authentic literary voice at all up to the point of her writing. (Or, in other words, up to that point the feminine voice in literature was mostly a male projection.) Writers can be too Manly-woman or Womanly-man, cautions Woolf. Maybe Franzen is too Manly-woman in his writing? The abject humiliation of men by their own petty and grandiose desires and fantasies is a common theme in his novels, for sure. Men are one of his biggest subjects. But worth noting anyway that Oprah honored his next novel, Freedom (2010), as well, and this time they met and made nice. And while The Corrections might lack complex female characters every novel since includes at least one strong female character, by my possibly overly Male lights, anyway. Actually, I think in her gently-brilliant way, Woolf was onto something here with this androgynous mind stuff, as she often was.
Franzen is also I think an anti-cat person. And I’m a cat person. But I don’t know all of his writing on this subject either. There is, however, a funny sub-story about cats vs birds he works into Freedom. Our bird loving protagonist, Walter, is intensely engaged in a low intensity war with neighborhood outdoor cats that menace the local bird population. I’d like to think that the cats and dogs and birds can all get along in some natural balance without threatening bird populations too much but I don’t know. I’ve never noticed any shortage of birds, who I enjoy along with all the other little critters, where I live in Seattle. But I know walking around my neighborhood that outdoor cats and dogs can be annoying, although dogs more than cats in my experience.
Anyway, I’ve read a few Franzen novels. I like them. He’s very smart, intensely observant, dryly funny, and I like the way he takes on political topics even when I don’t always entirely agree with his cynical takes. And not least of all probably because I do in fact sympathize with his cynical takes a fair amount.
Franzen writes merciless and savagely funny portraits of contemporary characters stuck in sprawling dysfunctional family sagas. It’s not that his characters lack depth or complexity, there is plenty, and it’s not that his characters never find any modest amount of redemption in their lives. They do. He’s always trying to plumb deeper than caricature. But one rule for Franzen’s characters, mostly (but not all) Americans, is how much they are always getting in their own way. Otherwise smart and sensitive people, people like you and me, easy to recognize, people with relatively humble goals and modestly laudable ambitions, working, coupling, supporting a family, being a friend, are repeatedly in Franzen novels, as if by clever literary trick, turned into muddled, self-justifying, excruciatingly cringe-inducing idiots by their unrealized ambitions and sexual desires and related fantasies.
Franzen is a master of a certain kind of character driven humiliation vignette. Our protagonist, a very self-conscious, sensitive, clever, if troubled person, launches plans of action, obsesses about them, driven by inchoate desires mulled over and over in their mind to the point the reader is following the story action in dreadful suspense, anticipating immanent disaster, some deeply humiliating spectacle, and when it arrives it’s always even more petty and degrading and funnier than you could have imagined. I’m no expert on the history of this literary device. But Dostoevsky did this a lot for me in his novels, if maybe with slightly less humor and way more angry and harrowing tragedy.
So, first off, in Crossroads (2021), Franzen’s latest novel, one such protagonist, Russ, 1960s Baby Boomer liberal and hapless small-town midwest church pastor, is my least favorite Franzen protagonist or central character to date; more cringe-inducing even than Walter in Freedom.
But two other characters of Crossroads I think stand up with some of Franzen’s best:
Perry, a Mensa teen with drug problems, suffers a show-stopping meltdown at a Christmas party, surreptitiously drunk on Glogg (highly alcoholic Swedish holiday drink), hilariously engaging two local religious leaders, one Jewish and one Catholic, in an erudite discussion of the possibility or impossibility of truly altruistic behavior. If all our individual actions are rooted in reflexive mental cost-benefit analysis, Perry pontificates, aren’t all our actions inescapably and ultimately selfish? It’s a doozy of a scene, both funny and poignant. And Perry is as curious and heartbreaking as any supporting character Franzen has written.
Even more sprawling and even more a tour de force is the backstory for Marian, who until nearly halfway through the novel we have only known as the frumpy, taciturn wife of over twenty years to Russ, the brooding and unhappy pastor that disparages and neglects her. But in a tense, high-pitch therapy session lasting several hours Marian launches into her backstory, recounting her sexual relationships before Russ, including being exploited by a married car salesman and being raped by some freaky Hollywood Babylon-like Santa Claus character who preys on young women coming up and trying to make it in mid-century Los Angeles. And thereby Marian transforms herself into the hero, such as there is in the novel, as muddled as everyone else but still somehow surviving, coming out the other side of her own spiritual abyss. Her self-lacerating intelligence burns hot. It’s delayed but when Marian’s character finally emerges she’s crucial to drawing all the threads of Franzen’s sprawling story together. Also, along with Patty in Freedom, and Pip in Purity, Marian stands out as one of Franzen’s strongest and most complex women characters to date.
In his grandest mode as a novelist Franzen wants to set his family sagas against a backdrop of big social, cultural, and/or political events. In The Corrections it’s the arms trade and wars in the Middle East. In Freedom it’s loss of natural habitats and environmental destruction. In Purity (2015) it’s the end of the Cold War and post-1989 global left movements. And now in Crossroads its race relations and more environmental degradation. But the balance between individual and familial travails and political themes has varied quite a bit in his novels.
In this respect Crossroads feels like a return to The Corrections, where the sex and drug adventures of the principal characters are nearly everything and the politics a background appendage. But The Corrections is by far Franzen’s best-selling novel to date. By contrast, in Freedom and Purity the characters are more deeply embedded in big political themes, but these books sold each progressively worse than The Corrections. Perhaps in balancing his own ambitions to make art and entertain a readership he decided his readers prefer more sex and drugs and less politics in their family sagas. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way for me. I recognize Franzen’s strength is in writing struggling, recognizable contemporary characters we can identify with but I like wrestling with his political commentary, it makes reading him more interesting to me.
It might also be that Franzen’s humor and satire work better at the level of the individual character. His funniest stuff so far was arguably in The Corrections. So perhaps better making fun of arm’s traders than environmentalists (Freedom) or global leftists (Purity)? His cynical wit turned on earnest do-gooding can seem cheap, churlish, maybe too much like punching down. But I like the big topical subject matter, gives me more to grapple with outside the suffocating psychological confines of all his frustrated individuals.
On the one hand Crossroads feels like a coming-of-age stoner comedy set in the early 1970s (a milieu with which I am familiar and enjoyed, by the way) and on the other a scathing satire of post-‘60s small town Christian youth group culture, including a pastor awkwardly lusting after a new single mother member of the church. Scratch the surface of the Crossroads community and we find broken homes, sexual abuse, a condescending obliviousness towards matters of race, and lots of alienation and social misfit stress and anguish. The contrast is striking and the simple Christian faith put forward to resolve these tensions in Crossroad’s conclusion feels awkward and inadequate to all the emotional trauma that preceded it.
Reportedly, Crossroads is the first novel in a proposed trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies, which might seem a tad pretentious up against the petty social and familial humiliations in this first installment. But this is where those keys lie, we must conclude Franzen has decided, and not in irresolvably big political issues. And the possible keys to mythologies in Crossroads? Our sexual desires and fantasies muddle our thinking and understandings of the world around us? And/or the way drugs and other various vices give shape to the stories we tell about ourselves? Or the way we persevere, however stumbling, in the face of the unavoidable and humiliating personal setbacks in our lives?
At any rate, a little bit of a letdown for me from the other three novels I know but I gather this goes against the grain of most popular opinion about Crossroads. Many seem to find it a return to form, warmer, more personable than the cynical political satire in Freedom and Purity. I find it a little less interesting and a little less convincing but I’m at least still curious as to where Franzen goes next in his search for the key to all mythologies.
