“Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. Three years ago he suffered a humiliation, which he blames in part on his wife. The town is New Prospect dad drives a Fury Crossroads is the name of the youth group created by Rick Ambrose, Russ’ younger protégé turned nemesis. The first section is titled “Advent.” It’s Dec. The Hildebrandts are made up of Russ, an associate pastor Marion, a stay-at-home mom and four kids - Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson. The family in “ Crossroads” is also steeped in God. Casaubon’s uncompleted work of theological scholarship in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” The irony here checks out: Casaubon, not unlike so many of Franzen’s male characters, is self-righteous, pompous, largely ineffectual. The title of the trilogy, “A Key to All Mythologies,” is also the name of Rev. Three years after that, Franzen was quoted as saying he “doesn’t know if anyone has more than six fully realized novels inside of him.” And yet here is “Crossroads,” his sixth - but the first in a proposed trilogy. Then “ Freedom.” “Purity” sold less than an eighth of the previous two novels but still did better than almost every other book in 2015 (and I would argue it was formally more interesting). Then, of course, “The Corrections” happened.
Pre-Oprah, pre - adulation it’s like those snapshots in Us Weekly : J Franz, he’s just like US! He was tired, terrified of writing for no one. He’d published two novels, which no one seemed to have read. I’ve long had a soft spot for Jonathan Franzen’s essay “ Why Bother?” Originally published in Harper’s in 1996, his manifesto for a more socially engaged literature - of the kind he went on to write - incorporates some of my favorite modes of Franzen: melancholic, earnest, esoteric, a little whiny. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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