Crossroads: A Novel

Description

Author: Franzen Jonathan

Package Dimensions: 0x229x1362

Number Of Pages: 592

Release Date: 05-10-2021

Details: Product Description

Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless―unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

Amazon.com Review

Jonathan Franzen is a master of the epic family dysfunction saga, and with
Crossroads he delivers on his talent and gives readers his most commercial book since 2001’s
The Corrections. During the 1971 Christmas season, the Hildebrant family is at a crossroads, if you will. Russ, the patriarch and associate pastor at his church, has recently fallen from grace in a scandal concerning the church’s youth group (also called Crossroads). At the same time, his four children are wading through issues of religion, drugs, Vietnam, social responsibility, and sex, while his wife is dealing with her own demons, madness, and body image problems. It’s classic Franzen—different narrators, different points of view, lots of interpersonal and internal drama.
Crossroads is the first in a planned trilogy, and I am anticipating becoming even more invested in the lives of the Hildebrants, which makes this novel somehow even more satisfying.
—Sarah Gelman, Amazon Editor

Review

Named a most anticipated book of the fall by The New York Times, USA Today, Oprah Daily, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Town & Country, The Guardian, Newsday, the Star Tribune, Lit Hub, Los Angeles magazine, Thrillist, The Week, and more…”A mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. Crossroads is warmer than anything [Franzen has] yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect . . . Franzen patiently clears space for the slow rise and fall of character, for the chiming of his themes and for a freight of events . . . [but] the character who cracks this novel fully open―she’s one of the glorious characters in recent American fiction―is Marion . . . The action in Crossroads flows and ebbs toward several tour-de-force scenes.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review”Superb . . . As 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 . . . Franzen has created characters of almost uncanny authenticity. Is there anything more a great novelist ought to do?” ―Laura Miller, Slate”The Corrections was a masterpiece, but Crossroads is [Franzen’s] finest novel yet . . . He has arrived at last as an artist whose first language, faced with the society of greed, is not ideological but emotional, and wh