So rather than a familiar trope, “Crossroads” is a hefty experiment: How far can you get exploring American ordinariness with a Tolstoyan depth? Rather, its hypocrisies are as meaningful literary fodder as a war zone or climate change. The unearned self-assurance that resides there isn’t, for him, a reason to neglect it. Review: Miriam Toews’ wise, wonderful 'Fight Night' celebrates three generations of womenīut in prior novels “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” Franzen took an ironic approach to Midwestern suburbia. To critics, he’s an anachronism – a chronicler of trite paternalism and a faded middle-class social order. By contrast, their teenage sister, Becky, discovers pot and finds God.įranzen’s career-long fixation with writing hefty novels about white-bread nuclear families has a way of making the Twitterati’s eyes roll faster than the reels of a slot machine. (The novel is set in 19.) His brother Perry is drifting into drug abuse for want of a religious center. Their eldest son, Clem, has given up his Vietnam War student deferment in a rash fit of moral recalibration. His wife, Marion, feels old unspoken traumas resurfacing. Russ, a pastor in the Chicago suburbs, feels his faith evaporating as he pursues a widowed member of his flock. Just about everybody in Jonathan Franzen’s superb domestic epic “Crossroads” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 592 pages, ★★★★ out of four) is dealing with a serious spiritual crisis. Watch Video: Cynthia Erivo’s moment: new album, new children’s book
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