'Look, even a so-so Jonathan Franzen novel is better than most novels. There are breathtaking sentences in this one! Several dozen of them! But I would argue that this ratio of breathtaking to inert sentences is not favorable, not in a novel of 592 pages.'
Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photo: Farrar, Straus and Giroux It is 1971. The cars are boxy, the coats are sheepskin, the lapels are yawning, the potatoes are served in a cream sauce, and the rec rooms are paneled in knotty pine. We are in New Prospect, a fictional suburb of Chicago. It is winter. A midwestern family is in crisis. This could only be a Jonathan Franzen novel.
Half of Crossroads takes place on a single pre-Christmas winter day, the rest in that day’s aftermath. The story is delivered through what Franzen has called “interlocking novellas.” The best of these come from the perspective of Russ’s wife, Marion, and their son Perry. Marion has a troubled past — psychotic episodes, sexual trauma, abortion — which she reveals to a psychiatrist whose office is discreetly camouflaged inside a dentistry practice.
He is boring even on topics that wouldn’t seem to abide boringness, like adulterous desire. When Russ’s mind turns to the hot parishioner: “He felt a melting warmth in his loins.” When the parishioner hugs him: “Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.” When she compliments him: “She could hardly have said anything more warming to his heart and loins.
In the course of writing this, I mentioned to three people that I was reading the new Jonathan Franzen novel, and they all nodded and said , “I have complicated feelings about Jonathan Franzen.” You know who else has complicated feelings about Jonathan Franzen? Jonathan Franzen. He has written and talked about his writing in a way that rubs some critics in a stop-doing-our-job sort of way but that I find pleasingly transparent and generous.
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