Set in the 1970s in a fictional suburb of Chicago, we open on patriarch Russ Hildebrandt, a former Mennonite and associate minister at First Reformed Church, who is haunted by a mysterious professional humiliation as he grapples with a crush he’s nursing on a parishioner, the middle-aged widow Frances Cottrell. The conclusion it comes to is clearly no. In a world filled with uncritical messages about the importance of introspection, self-expression, and sexual liberation, Crossroads calls into question whether all this freedom to look inward has done us all that much good. And its clear, unambiguous lessons are lessons that readers need to be reminded of-in some cases, long to be reminded of. It’s well-written, cinematic, and entertaining. Yet I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a bad book.Ĭrossroads is a great book. Or maybe, more generously, A Christmas Carol.

I remarked to a friend while reading it, without any irony, that it reminded me of Harry Potter. Yet for all the statements it makes-about altruism, about the dangers of over-indulgence in navel-gazing individualism, about the inefficacy of social justice, about mental illness, about faith in God and redemption, about liberalism and religion-it’s sex where Franzen seems to have the most to say.Ĭrossroads is both formulaic and moralistic, and it’s not very demanding from a literary perspective. The novel is an ambitious, almost six-hundred-page first installment of a family trilogy which has an equally ambitious title, A Key to All Mythologies.

The most striking feature of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Crossroads, is its sexual conservatism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 592 pages

Jonathan franzen new book release date