Crossroads
by Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads, his sixth, is also his best: brilliantly plotted and paced, as heavy with ideas as with heart, and showing on literally every page a careful interweaving of story and theme. That being said, Crossroads is not the sort of book where, if someone said they were turned off by the first ten pages, you’d tell them to persevere. It’s one of Franzen’s professional distinctions that his prose can so consummately repulse a reader in so short a sample.

It’s safe to say, however, that, if you already hate his work, you might hate this one least of all.

Crossroads is much less pretentious than Franzen’s 2001 blockbuster, The Corrections, with its long chapter called “Everything I Know About Science and Patents,” or his 2011 follow-up, Freedom, both of which seemed to imply a near-omniscient understanding of Life in America. Those two novels also perfected what might be called The Franzen Framing Technique. Of which more’ll be said in a moment. Because technique is critical for a novelist like Franzen, whose stories, put simply, are not interesting (I say this, incidentally, as an admirer).

They are, in fact, repellently mundane when presented in summary. Better, then, to avoid any summarization of Crossroads beyond the fact that it’s about a family of six (four kids plus mom and dad) who are all dealing with personal demons on Christmas Eve in 1971. To mention that one kid is brilliant but smokes too much weed, and another is beautiful but flees her problems, or that the parents’ marriage is crumbling – you can find juicier stuff on the sidewalk.

What serves the author, given this career-long commitment to chronicling the life of middle-class middle-Americans (“middles,” according to Franzen’s despised precursor, John Updike, being the place where “extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules”), is his ability to so brilliantly structure and pace these mundane stories, and to capture so vividly the frays and tangles in his characters’ relationships. A distinct pleasure in Franzen’s novels is spending a hundred pages alone with each character in a family (or family-type unit), and then understanding, progressively, how deeply each character misunderstands the others. But, at the same time, how perfectly they do understand each other.

A few years ago I sat with Ricardo Pau-Llosa, a poet who’s also very passionate about studying painters’ careers. When studying an artist, Pau-Llosa takes the spelunker’s approach: he studies the biography, the materials, the historical moment.

We were talking about movies at the time, about prolific filmmakers like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock – brilliant artists who are also prolific, leaving behind fifty movies or more, of which some are great, many are good, others dreadful. When I asked him to approximate his ideal size for a great artist’s body of work, such that it’s most fun to study, he said the artist in question would have something like “ten big works. Three of them are great. The other seven are just OK – but interesting for how they relate to the great ones.”

Well, taking a Pau-Llosian lens to literature, Franzen wrote a fascinating novel just before this new one.

What’s now most often said of Franzen’s fifth novel Purity, to the extent that it’s talked about at all, is that it was basically a flop, selling a paltry 200,000 copies (pah!) compared to the million-plus of its two precursors. The other consensus about Purity, which seems more informed by receipts than by what appeared on the page, is that it sucked.

Maybe it did. But from a bird’s eye view of Franzen’s career, Purity marks an interesting change, because it’s the novel where he seems to realize (and confront) the fact that his novels’ plots are not interesting. So in Purity he contrives a bludgeon-type murder story, and gives a pretty good Dostoevsky impersonation. There’s a Woodwardian romp about journalists chasing a “misplaced” missile. There’s an espionage storyline about leaking government secrets. There’s lots of sex, though much of it is awkward, strained, or worse. (Crossroads is his third consecutive novel in which a leading female character’s life is changed by rape.)

And more importantly--there’s the Franzen Framing Technique.

Here’s how it works: At the start of the novel our young female protagonist flirts with a young man at her local coffee shop. Romance! We also learn that she’s broke, and that she lives in a boarding house with a political zealot of mysterious affiliations. Intrigue! The very-moderate suspense of her romance, and of her increasing financial desperation, hits a peak on her third or fourth date with this young man: The Sex Date.

That’s the suspenseful frame for our chapter: Tonight, finally, the two romantic leads are slated to have sex.

They go to get ramen but, having agreed to split the check, our young protagonist pretends not to be hungry. She’s broke, remember, and can’t afford it. But she’s also starving. She’s so hungry that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to focus on sex if/when they get to it.

Now, imagine another frame, slightly smaller than the first one, and place it inside that larger frame, because we now have a drama within a drama: First, we wonder if the date will go well-enough that they go home to have sex; second, we wonder whether she’ll get anything to eat.

The date goes well (our outer frame is turning green!). Our heroes head back to her boarding house, they go upstairs but, wait!, she can’t find her condoms!

So now there’s a frame within the frame within the frame: Will she find a condom?!

She runs downstairs to get the condom and, yes, there it is! Success! And, while she’s down here, right near the kitchen...well, maybe a quick bowl of cereal. But can she eat it fast enough?!

Set another frame within the other two. Ratchet suspense accordingly.

It’s looking promising but, now that she’s in the thick of her cereal, the mysterious political operative from two doors down has taken a seat across from her at the table and is about to reveal her political affiliations. Thus, the otherwise squalid question of whether our broke protagonist will get laid or not becomes a brilliantly-structured exercise in suspense! And the reading experience is curiously exhilarating.

But then you step away from the book and wonder what that suspense was in service of.

If that assessment of the technique sounds flippant or condescending, it’s to balance the scales here, because a serious consideration of Crossroads, and its use of that technique, is bound to be long and a little too earnest, and to use words like “magisterial” and “profound” with respect to how Franzen renders the very simple sadness of people hurting each other with the best intentions.

There’s the older brother who thinks he’s helping the younger by asking, before a self-defeating chess maneuver, “Are you sure you want to do that?” hoping to improve the little brother’s game until the kid bursts into tears and screams at him for his condescension.

There’s the character who, when speaking to a man who lost his son in Vietnam, tries to show compassion by denouncing the war--when what he’s doing, in the father’s eyes, is denigrating the cause for which his son gave his life.

There’s the wealthy white woman who goes to a Black church and, out of concern, suggests that a disabled child be taken from his young mother and placed in foster care--showing her ignorance of how foster care specifically damages such children, and presumably never guessing that the members of this church are already taking care of him.

Franzen, in his sixties, has achieved a new peak of success. Proudly committed to his familiar material, Crossroads contentedly presents more of the same things he’s been covering his whole career, the only difference being that he’s doing it better than ever. And he’s been on the scene long enough now that, before you pick up this new one, you probably already know if you’ll enjoy it.

In that respect, it’s maybe Franzen himself who frames it.

Alex Sorondo is the host of Thousand Movie Project Podcast. His eBooks, My Three Repugnant Children and The Moon and Her Sister Turn Thirty and Leave, are available on Amazon. He lives in Miami.