And its clear, unambiguous lessons are lessons that readers need to be reminded of-in some cases, long to be reminded of. It’s well-written, cinematic, and entertaining.
Yet I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a bad book.Ĭrossroads is a great book. Or maybe, more generously, A Christmas Carol. I remarked to a friend while reading it, without any irony, that it reminded me of Harry Potter. Yet for all the statements it makes-about altruism, about the dangers of over-indulgence in navel-gazing individualism, about the inefficacy of social justice, about mental illness, about faith in God and redemption, about liberalism and religion-it’s sex where Franzen seems to have the most to say.Ĭrossroads is both formulaic and moralistic, and it’s not very demanding from a literary perspective. The novel is an ambitious, almost six-hundred-page first installment of a family trilogy which has an equally ambitious title, A Key to All Mythologies.
The most striking feature of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Crossroads, is its sexual conservatism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 592 pages
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