The affair, with a married salesman at the Los Angeles car dealership where Marion worked, haunts her. He was working for the Navajo and she was going through an ecstatic Catholic stage following a catastrophe she’s only partially confessed to Russ, an affair and a breakdown and a transaction with a person she firmly believes to have been Satan. “The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days,” Russ thinks, “the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed.”Īlthough they don’t realize it, Russ and Marion-the novel’s most magnificently realized character-share this attraction to Christianity’s masochistic side. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he.” At times, the lust he feels for his comely parishioner seems like a pretext to punish himself as a perverse validation of his faith. Listening to Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” Russ tells himself he is “an outsider, a latter-day parasite-a fraud. “What Russ most liked about Theo,” the Black pastor whose congregation he aids, “was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies.” On the other hand, that humility also comes tangled up in narcissistic self-loathing. Russ, whose squirming attempts at adultery encourage the reader’s contempt, approaches his relief work with a countervailing maturity.
Not so long ago, while living in New York City, he and Marion were “the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action.” But the younger minister who usurped him as the leader of Crossroads takes a more “psychological and streetwise” approach, focusing the youth group on heartfelt confessions and discussions of intragroup relationships, an intimation of the Me Decade to come.Īs with the best of Franzen’s fiction, the characters in Crossroads are held up to the light like complexly cut gems and turned to reveal facet after facet.
(Readers who prefer his breakout 2001 novel, The Corrections, will surely welcome this.) For Russ, who organizes volunteer work in the inner city and at a Navajo reservation, the ’70s bring a humiliating shift in identity. Unlike Franzen’s previous two novels, 2010’s Freedom and 2015’s Purity, Crossroads is light on curmudgeonly social commentary. The social change convulsing America in 1971 only lightly shapes the crises that beset the Hildebrandts. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
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