Book Review : Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads (2021)
It might seem strange now in a post-COVID, post-Trump, post-attention-span world, but Jonathan Franzen was once the most talked-about writer in America. But it’s true. It happened. And people hated him for it. There was a time when we had the bandwidth to get genuinely upset about whether a novelist should accept Oprah’s endorsement. That was a real argument. A national conversation. Imagine being mad at someone for not wanting to be more famous. That’s how boring the culture used to be.
Franzen has always been great at what he does, no matter how irritating he may seem to people who need their artists to also be likable. And reading Crossroads in 2025 feels like revisiting a kind of novel we quietly stopped making room for : character-driven, rooted in history, sprawling without being showy. It’s Franzen doing what he does best, just with a little less noise around it.
Crossroads follows the Hildebrandt family as they quietly implode under the weight of their values, failures, and desires in the early seventies. Russ, the patriarch and local minister, drifts away from his faltering marriage, distracted by his own inability to connect with the youth and his growing attraction to Frances Cottrell, a younger and sexier parishioner than his wife, Marion, who herself is trying to reclaim the young woman she left behind by breaking free from the confines of her boring marriage.
Their oldest son Clem wants to enlist and get shipped off to Vietnam, driven by a crushing guilt for being a privileged college kid while boys his age die or return broken. Becky throws herself into popularity and her own burgeoning sexuality, fixated on Tanner, the charismatic church group leader. And Perry…well, his crippling self-awareness feels less like insight and more like a life sentence to misery when you’re a Jonathan Franzen character.
Breaking Free from Judeo-Christian Values
So yeah, Crossroads is the first volume in a trilogy Franzen calls A Key to All Mythologies, which sounds like the name of a forgotten Yes album but is actually a reference to how foundational narratives like Christianity shape not just personal identity, but national character. The Hildebrandts are devoted Christians, but that devotion doesn’t liberate them. It traps them. It flattens them. It makes them miserable in the specific, silent way only moral frameworks can, when the people inside them are too scared to admit they want something else.
Take Russ, the patriarch. He lives in the long shadow of a professional "humiliation", an unspoken defeat at the hands of a younger, cooler minister named Rick Ambrose. This happened three years ago, but it became his entire personality. Russ can’t move past it, and worse, he can’t find a meaningful response to it inside the teachings of the Gospel.
There’s a remarkable scene where he confronts Rick not with fury, but with this sad, stumbling moral confusion. Both men speak in the language of theology, quoting scripture and performing righteousness, but it only heightens the awkwardness. Because Russ doesn’t want resolution. Not really. He wants something dirtier. Something outside the lines. But the problem with adopting a belief system as your moral ceiling is that you stop knowing how to step outside it when you need to. And Russ needs to. He just can’t yet.
Each member of the Hildebrandt family is forced to confront the same impossible question: what do you do when your values no longer serve you, but abandoning them feels like a kind of death? Clem literally tries to sacrifice himself by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, only to discover that nobody actually wants his selflessness. Becky leans into her desires, stepping outside the tidy social script she was handed, even if it means destabilizing a social ecosystem that was perfectly content without her.
And Perry, the most introspective and tortured of the bunch, comes to understand that goodness isn’t transactional. You can’t earn your way into being whole. For him, the real transgression is accepting his own vulnerability, something he’s spent most of the novel trying to outthink, outperform, or medicate.
The Great Disillusion
Even though it’s probably the most focused and straightforward novel he’s ever written, Crossroads is still unmistakably Franzen. It’s the same thing he’s always done: turning characters into slow-burning allegories for cultural sentiment. In this case, the Hildebrandt family becomes a vessel for the national hangover following the idealism of the 1960s.
Each character is reckoning with the limits of their inherited worldview: moral certainty, social cohesion, personal destiny and scrambling to evolve before the disillusionment calcifies into permanent heartbreak. The optimism is gone, but the need for meaning still lingers, which makes Crossroads feel less like a family drama and more like a spiritual detox in real time, like The Corrections, but with less professional burnouts and more Jesus.
This cultural heartbreak is ultimately what makes the Hildebrandts so endearing. Each one of them is struggling (often painfully) with failure, and yet each one finds a way forward. Not by doubling down, but by becoming someone new. And that’s not just relatable; it’s quietly inspiring. Everyone, at some point, wakes up to the crushing realization that their most deeply held beliefs have led them somewhere they didn’t want to be.
But very few people have the courage or the humility to admit it, let alone change course. That’s what’s so remarkable about Crossroads: it doesn’t just chronicle collapse. It shows how to rebuild from it. It offers the rarest thing a serious novel can offer in 2025: hope without bullshit.
*
I don’t know if the Hildebrandts will return in the next volume of A Key to All Mythologies, but if they do, there’s a decent chance they’ll be jaded, coked-up, Flock of Seagulls–loving yuppies, drifting through the Reagan era with tight smiles and unspoken regrets. That would only make sense.
But even if Franzen never writes another word, these characters stand on their own. They do emerge from a specific cultural hangover, but they’re still wobbling through a kind of spiritual detox that feels painfully familiar in 2025. They’re unmoored, flawed, often misguided, but they’re trying. And you don’t have to like Franzen to recognize that. You just have to admit they feel familiar.
8.1/0
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