Marion is dissatisfied with the way her life and marriage have turned out, which is manifested mostly in her desire to lose weight. Pastor Russ is smitten with another woman, a young widow who is one of his parishioners. Nothing about the Hildebrandts’ middle-class, Midwestern anomie is new for a Franzen novel, even if it is well-done.
(Perhaps we’ll hear from Judson once he’s more than “an appealing and well-regulated youngster.”) He’s a pastor, and, given when the novel is set, maybe the best word for her is “housewife.” They have four children: the idealistic naïf Clem, an undergraduate Becky, a pretty and popular high schooler Perry, a too-brilliant-for-his-own-good teen and Judson, the baby of the family, in whom no one, Franzen included, seems especially interested. He’s surely among the great American novelists, but Crossroads also finds Franzen discharging his powers in a way that feels like a departure.Ĭrossroads centers on the Hildebrandts of New Prospect, Ill., an invented Chicago suburb. He’s a storyteller, a master at holding the reader’s attention, himself attentive to that reader’s pleasure.
But that I read all 580 pages of it (too many being presumed great means editors give you a wide berth) in three days is a testament to Franzen’s ability with the novel form. It’s played straight, with nary a joke or postmodern gag in evidence. The novel itself is familiar, stepping back from Purity’s manic register, eschewing interest in the present moment and attempting a study of God and faith set in the 1970s. The book was zany, a ripping yarn that felt like it must have been fun for the author to write, especially after the dour Freedom.Ĭrossroads, Franzen’s sixth work of fiction and the first of a planned trilogy (called “A Key to All Mythologies,” after Edward Casaubon’s life’s work in Middlemarch maybe Franzen isn’t as humorless as he can seem), will doubtless reignite the familiar debates about his stature. There was still a family and big issues involved (gentrification, journalism, the fall of East Germany, and the rise of the Internet), but there was also a tone of near-absurdity. Purity, published in 2015, was, in its way, a sidestep, indebted to Dickens, full of coincidence and intrigue (secret identity, mysterious paternity, a billion-dollar fortune).
0 kommentar(er)
