When studying an artist, Pau-Llosa takes the spelunker’s approach: he studies the biography, the materials, the historical moment. But, at the same time, how perfectly they do understand each other.Ī few years ago I sat with Ricardo Pau-Llosa, a poet who’s also very passionate about studying painters’ careers. 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. 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. 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. 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. They are, in fact, repellently mundane when presented in summary. Because technique is critical for a novelist like Franzen, whose stories, put simply, are not interesting (I say this, incidentally, as an admirer). Those two novels also perfected what might be called The Franzen Framing Technique. It’s safe to say, however, that, if you already hate his work, you might hate this one least of all.Ĭrossroads 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. It’s one of Franzen’s professional distinctions that his prose can so consummately repulse a reader in so short a sample.

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.

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.

Crossroads by jonathan franzen review