American novelist Jonathan Franzen has in his last three fictional works taken words that loom large in the collective consciousness and built worlds around them. First, it was Freedom (2010), then Purity (2015), and now Crossroads (2021). The latter title, of course, refers to a literal and figurative decision-making moment, but also the mythic locale where blues singers, notably Robert Johnson, made their pacts with the devil. And as Christians worldwide know, the ‘crossroads’ moniker has for decades been applied to Christian ministries, media, groups, and churches.
All of the above are live concerns in Franzen’s novel. The Hilderbrandts, a late 1960s’ church family in New Prospect, Illinois, led by liberal pastor Russ and his wife Marion, are on the thresholds of big decisions, some of which might be said to involve deals with the devil. And, in a nation also at an historical crossroads, much of the action results from the formation of the controversial but wildly popular ‘Crossroads’ youth ministry at Russ’s First Reformed Church. Even Robert Johnson’s famous ‘Crossroads’ song has a brief spin on the turntable when Russ gets chemically experimental with a divorced female parishioner.
Franzen is famous for authentically capturing both the sweep of history and the minutiae of human psychology and relationships. His breakout novel, The Corrections (2001), forensically studied the dysfunctional Lambert family as its generational values clashed, while Freedom centred on the Berglunds of St Paul, Minneapolis, as their green liberal values met economic and other social realities. In Crossroads, Russ and Marion’s mores and unresolved pasts bump against their parishioners, colleagues and children’s values during America’s Vietnam-era countercultural revolution, with cataclysmic results.
Franzen again tears off masks of hypocrisy, whether individual or societal, but with compassion for human suffering. What’s unique, however, about Crossroads in his oeuvre is the attention given to the practice and psychology of belief in God. Through detailed backstory and exposition of inner worlds, Crossroads investigates how belief and faith in God, or the lack thereof, impacts every aspect of a person’s existence — for better and for worse, Franzen reminds us.
Novels from Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Barbara Kingsolver, Morris West, Marilynne Robinson, and Patrick White, among many others, have covered this terrain. But it’s rare for a contemporary novel’s action to centre on a church community. And with Franzen, one of the world’s most widely read novelists, often considered America’s greatest living writer, undertaking this study, it means Christianity, theology, and ecclesiology are now under the world literary spotlight.
'It’s a telling and deep study for people of faith about how acting on poor theology can create personal, family, and social chaos, topped with a reminder that grace is close by when we stand at the crossroads.'
In the same era Crossroads is set, French literary theorist Roland Barthes published his influential essay, The Death of the Author. Impacting literary criticism for decades, it held that an author’s background, beliefs and intentions when writing a work are irrelevant. The work should be judged as it appears on the page.
Today’s climate for literature’s reception and critique might be described as the ‘rebirth of the author’. A writer’s race, background, culture and beliefs are often the first points of reference for appreciating their work. And authors’ intentions are likewise scrutinised through the same grid, as interviewers and readers seek to discover from the writer precisely how their words should be interpreted.
After reading and enjoying Crossroads’ powerful study of the psychology of belief, seeing so much of my own and others’ Christian journeys in it, I was tempted to find out more about Franzen’s background and intentions. Against my normal Barthes’-driven instincts, I was intrigued about what role Christianity has played in Franzen’s life and what he believes. I was interested to know to what extent his insights into faith and belief were personal and to what extent research based. Why did he decide to look so closely at faith and belief in this novel, and did he mean Crossroads as a parody of belief, or were his sympathies split?
I stood at the crossroads, but I chose my normal path. I accepted that my position as a Christian meant I read the novel a certain way, and that was enough.
It was enough for me to be reminded, through Russ, particularly, that people can interpret circumstances and others’ behaviour as constituting God’s providence for them, when it is merely their own wishful thinking that God will support their selfish agendas. That prayer can be just a dialogue with the ego, and even moments of genuine grace between people, evidenced in a compelling scene between Russ and his ‘frenemy’ and Crossroads leader Rick Ambrose, can be later manipulated to serve our personal agendas. And then to see, through Russ’s circling from marriage and career despair to fulfilment in both, the way God is shown, often in Crossroads, to always work for the good of those who love God (Romans 8:28).
Russ, Marion, and their daughter Becky’s faith journeys remind us how easy it is to take our understanding of God and manipulate it for our own ends. How we can justify our poor choices and behaviour through our little deals with God, which might actually be deals with God’s counterpart. How cults can start and people can do evil in the name of the God they purport to love.
If Franzen meant his novel as, to an extent, a parody for non-believers, or as a straightforward exposure of religious hypocrisy for the same audience, then he achieved those ends. But, at the same time, it’s a telling and deep study for people of faith about how acting on poor theology can create personal, family, and social chaos, topped with a reminder that grace is close by when we stand at the crossroads.
Paul Mitchell is a Melbourne writer and his latest book is Matters of Life and Faith (Coventry Press, 2021)
Main image: Main street, USA (KeithBishop / Getty Images)