CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen 🇺🇸 BOOK REVIEW

Crossroads is the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen. The sometimes controversial American writer is back with yet another tale of a Midwestern American family in what could be his best novel yet.

The main characters in Franzen's Crossroads are naughty Christians whose lives are on the verge of changing forever (or perhaps staying like they were). The time is the early 1970s and the place is mostly the fictional New Prospect Township of suburban Chicago, and also Arizona, and California. This is our first time with the Hildebrandts and the members of the Crossroads youth group but it won't be our last. Crossroads is the first novel in a projected trilogy ironically entitled The Key to All Mythologies.

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[allicette]

Fantastic review. Your comment comparing Franzen's two books, Crossroads, and The Corrections, illustrates the comment I made on your video review about American Pastoral by Philip Roth. If I may paraphrase, you say there is more creative chaos in The Corrections than in Crossroads. I counter with David Foster Wallace's passing, Franzen has retreated into a more standard-ish approach to his novels; not necessarily a bad thing, but I miss what could have been. There isn't a Braque/Picasso rivalry/friendship anymore, and literature is less for it.

[RalfMtr]

I just read it. Great novel: A rollercoaster. As a non-American my highlights and points of view differ a little… or a lot from most Americans.

[fadista]

Well this sounds very intriguing! I have not read anything by this author although I remember working in retail books when The Corrections came out. Thank you for this review of those two books--I think I will read Crossroads as it sounds like it will be very relatable to my own life growing up in the 1970s (I will let you know how well it resounds!). There might be only one cultural milieu that could rival the dysfunction of the midwestern religious upbringing and that is the southern religious upbringing 😛