Henk's Reviews > Crossroads

Very impressive in description of scenes, confrontations and interiority of characters. But also very long and with almost oppressive amounts of guilt, morality, Christianity and shame
I don't even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don't think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong

Shame and guilt is a clear theme in Crossroads, where we follow the Hildebrandt family and their struggles in the early 1970's.
What is the right thing? What is ones true self? Everyone in the book, including side characters, seem to be wrestling with these questions.
Racial tension is also a clear theme, already at the start the foxy one-on-one of assistent minister Russ and a recent widow is marred by the harsh reality of the south side of Chicago (When you are poor everything just happens to you).
Russ in his sexuality seems to be constantly on in respect to the women around him, just excluding his wife Marion.

Crossroads is the program of community outreach in the Southside of Chicago that Russ used to participate in, but metaphysically the whole family is on all kinds of crossroads. Perry, their IQ of 160 genius son, is doing drugs to dim the too acute awareness of the world his intelligence provides him. Clem the oldest son goes through first love and feels the injustice of him being in college while people are still fight in Vietnam. Becky is an all popular daughter who effortlessly expanded her influence to Crossroads, but now has her heart to deal with and whose relationship with Clem is under severe strain. Only Judson, the youngest son and closest confidant to Perry, seems reasonably unencumbered.

In the few days before Christmas a lot of family dynamics come to boil, with dramatic confrontations and full on epiphanies that can easily be compared to any Greek mythology (in that sense this being the first of a trilogy of Jonathan Franzen call the "The Key to All Mythologies" seems apt).

Rick Ambrose the upstart currently leading Crossroads and reaching 120 youths, including Russ his children Becky and Perry, is an important point of tension. He uses sect like methods to foster honest exchanges between the youths, which in one of the first chapters of the book lead to a confrontation between Becky and Perry.
Crossroads as a group has awkward public displays of emotion and fondling among teenagers to break walls between social classes. There are inner circles and in general Stalinist social dynamics with sharing of bad thoughts to the group; it gives a claustrophobic feel to much of the youth group set scenes of the book.
The Becky and Perry confrontation is incredibly well done, and a real explanation on why someone would want to change his or her moral life (Did his soul change every time he got a new insight?).
The verbosity of the characters, which they use to cut to the core of their grievances with each other, is impressive:
An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive.
Perry about the beauty of his sister Becky
And:
I don’t even know you well enough to have a feeling about you. I don’t think anybody really knows you. I think the people who think they do are wrong. - Becky's takedown of Perry is just wow.

The looking down of Perry on others is rather tiring, but a sign of the very well executed, beautifully done characterization of Franzen.

The way how Becky neatly introduces Clem, her college student brother, and his character in how he stands up for her against a dog, for instance is also chefs kiss.
Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted.
The college application essays are a fascinating method to give more insight into Becky and her family relations, as a metronome between altruistic brother Clem and glamorous aunt Shirley of Marion (mother to the Hildebrandt children) who has the following slogan: Better of rich than talented.

Becky her struggle is between not carrying about status or popularity or being a good person, even made more acutely by an inheritance.
To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck in her mind a happy balance between the very different people whose example mattered to her.
And then she has to content with a potential boyfriend Tanner, who initially sounds like a jerk first class when speaking to Becky, undercutting her use of disdain as a defensive mechanism.
Again we gain (at the same moment as the character) very profound insights in the core of a person:
I want to be liked might have been the most honest words she ever uttered.
Or observations like:
It’s easier to pray when you feel weak. Easier to pray for strength than for humility.

Clem(ent) his choice to drop out given the Vietnam war feels callous, especially to essentially just escape from an overbearing girlfriend and some classwork. His feverish relationship with sex seems to be similar in a way to the struggle his father has with the subject.
He comes across very self-righteousness (and in that way a very well depicted adolescent); if I had a breakdown every time I was procrastinating I’d be dead by now, was a thought that often struck me in his segments.
He is also very much too brutally honest, saying things like:
I love who you are, but I am not in love with you.

Only after a few of these deep dives in characters we get to why Russ left Crossroads and how he could have lost control of a group of teenagers.
Along the way we subtly learn how everyone in the family thinks of another child as favourite of one of the parents.

Marion, the mother who struggles with her weight and visits a psychiatrist comes into focus next. A modern kind of confessional these visits, a paid friend to a mother who is clearly struggling. Body dysmorphia seems only one of the smaller of her psychological issues to contend with:
Its not just me by the way, Marion said. I think everyone is bad, I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. Or: There is no escaping the consequences of the life I’ve made. That the therapist says the below seems the only sensible question:
Why is is every time a man injures you respond by feeling guilty?

Taboos on mental health and earlier sexual relationships come back. A lot of drama in Marion her childhood, through the Great Depression and the suicide of her father, leading to a breakup of her family. And again family, here a sister who is more perceived as more talented and favourited, leads to tragedy.
That people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.
It makes you wonder how much you know of your parents life before they became your parents.
There is passion verging on (and exceeding) crazy, which seems supposed to be a family trait?

It's no wonder that when we turn to Perry there is not much sunshine to be found there. He uses people (after a brief intermezzo of reform) with a targeted instrumentality. Sometimes he calls friends: of scant utility, making sympathising with him quite hard.
The discussion that Perry has with the Rabbi and reverend at almost the halfway point of the book, on the question if true, selfless goodness is possible, seems to be the heart of the book. Not much later Becky realises something similar:
Maybe everyone does that, find ways to feel good about their fundamental sinfulness.

It’s a very zoomed in book, with very big personal events in a very small timeframe, making the switch around 65% of the book to Easter and some of the fallout of Christmas, strange.
Also it makes the technique of characters constantly seeing one’s own actions in the light of other’s judgement or based on own impure intentions, where they then act only moderately to appallingly ineffectively upon, more clear and less new.
Repetitions of the complaint Marion makes: I’m just not a good enough person keep being abundant, while most of the characters seem to continue on their live in broadly the same manner as just before Christmas and all their big life changing events. That in a sense is probably deeply human, but also made me as a reader a bit tired to read anew about mistakes people make, then beat themselves up about, and then continue further upon with in the same vein.
Someone even comments on this: The idea I could be a different kind of person is just a fantasy.

There is a deep dive into the Navajo’s and Russ his youth that I feel would have more naturally fit in the Christmas segments, maybe as a juxtaposition to all we learned about the background of Marion.
In the end no one gets what they want (or more precisely, they do get what they want but it sure as hell turns out not to be in all instances to be what they need).

With a bit more focus and compression I feel this would have been a 5 star book for me, now I was wowed by the writerly prowess of Franzen but do feel the pacing is off, and the book is a bit long. Still a very well executed novel and I am definitely curious to see how the Hildebrandts will progress further through American history.

Quotes:
There is eternity in every second we are alive.

His stringency a compensation for some underlying weakness

It was strange self pity wasn’t on the list of deathly sins

As if feeling his penis made her sleepy 😂

I love you
I appreciate that

Hope was the refuse of the stupid

I don’t deserve joy.
No one does, it’s a gift from god