Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events - a car wreck, rape, suicide attempts, adultery, drug deals, arson - that arrive only slowly, as if revealed in sunlight creeping steadily across a lawn. If I missed some of the acid of his earlier novels, well, this one has powerful compensations. Crossroads is warmer than anything he’s yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect. a mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. What impresses most is the sense that its successors, hopefully present soon, will all but certainly exceed it. Crossroads is Franzen’s greatest and most perfect novel to date, but more importantly, it is his most promising: an inexhaustible resource for future novels, and not only his own. All of this sounds Dostoyevskian because (with the requisite adaptation for American environs) it is. His ambition in this novel is not only to mirror society, but to return the individual reader to themselves, to grind a lens in which the major questions structuring our single lives on Earth retain their focus and integrity. Though no serious fiction writer would impose their own belief upon their readers, what Crossroads does make clear is that Franzen, through his characters, has rendered it impossible for readers not to be engaged by the most momentous questions of faith. In a quiet and uncanny fashion it is entirely adequate: a prosaic causeway coursing through the swamp at night.

Unpolished and unsloppy, difficult to quote or fault, his free indirect style sticks to the contours of consciousness and attempts not one thing else. The Corrections was a masterpiece, but Crossroads is his finest novel yet. In playing to his strengths so inordinately he has unlocked a new, late style, distinct from the well-hewn blocks of prose poetry typical of his first three novels or the mashed-potatoes-and-gravy consistency of his last two. To set a novel half a century in the past, as he now does, is something like dealing oneself a full house. In dreams, as a once-famed tale from the Depression had it, begin responsibilities. Giving up, for now, in Crossroads, on representing present youth, Franzen has doubled down on representing the white ones’ parents and grandparents as the impressionable, inquisitive, and dynamically flawed young men and women that they once had been.

Crossroads jonathan franzen summary