Criticism of ‘Crossroads’ by Jonathan Franzen: the family on an American plane

In an article published in ‘The Guardian’ 20 years ago, devoted to examining the state of health of the American narrative just after the attack on the Twin Towers, the critic James Wood spoke of “hysterical realism & rdquor; as one of its most feverish symptoms. In short, epic novels with a social conscience such as ‘The Corrections’, which was published the same week of 9/11, were characterized by “fear of silence & rdquor ;. It was a curious way to define the literature of Jonathan Franzen, who had just left the palimpsests of postmodernity to embrace the possibility of signing a Great American Novel that was, at the same time, a family epic on the Tolstoi record – you know, all the unhappy families look alike- and a political commentary on a generation, a country and a sign of the times. Now Franzen continues to deny his postmodern beginnings, although the density of ‘Crossroads’, with its dense subplots, stitched with gold thread to the broken identities of members of another dysfunctional family, the Hildebrandts, is typically Fosterwallacian, if not because his style is fluid and accessible and, now, the great themes of ‘Las correcciones’ and ‘Libertad’ (climate change, the new puritanism, culture and class warfare, etc.) have been replaced by stories of Ordinary folks from the Midwest that Franzen wants to turn into the first part of a trilogy that will add up to, we speculate, two thousand pages of text.

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Franzen has sharpened his powers of observation, if that really could get better after ‘Libertad’, for this critic his best novel (then came the most discussed ‘Purity’). If there is something worth reading these magnificent ‘Crossroads’ is because of the abysmal depth with which it addresses the complexity of its characters. The rosetta stones of his ‘dramatis personae’, shining in a fictional Illinois town in 1971, are Russ, a suburban pastor who hangs on his awkwardly passionate attraction to a widow in his congregation, and Marion, his wife, who She lives hanging from a past love that plunged her into depression. From this unhappy marriage, which is repelled within the limits of a home marked by the crisis of faith not in God but in earthly life, four children are born who multiply the crossroads of the title (which, on the other hand, pluralizes the name of a evangelical sect that functions as a nemesis of Russ’ parish), addressing a range of issues – among others, desire, frustration, addiction, love, hypocrisy – that do not depend on that general plan about North American society to which Franzen alluded to the trompe l’oeil of his previous novels, as if he had somehow discovered that the truth about American society is found in the American plane, that three-quarter shot that allows us to see the body and face of its protagonists as a everything that harmonically combines the psychological and the emotional. Like in a western, a ‘Crossroads’ you can see his guns and his eyes, and it is a pleasure to travel from one to another.