Jonathan Franzen writes a family that feels familiar

“Ambitious.” That’s the word you’ll find splattered across the many reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. Throughout the book’s nearly 600 pages, Franzen pries into the seemingly quiet existence of the suburban Hildebrandt family and exposes the tensions that threaten to pull its members apart. As he does, he asks us to consider all manner of big questions. How well can we truly know someone? What does it mean to live and act in an authentic fashion? Are our attempts to be good forever tainted by our self-interests? How can we know or experience God?

The novel’s title mirrors its narrative structure. It follows not one single story but five different stories—or roads—told from the points of view of five Hildebrandts. These stories run in five different directions but cross paths as Franzen revisits key events and themes. But while this narrative structure may keep readers thinking of crossroads, it’s not the novel’s most direct connection to the title. That would be the Crossroads youth group at First Reformed, the small-town Illinois church where Russ Hildebrandt, the patriarch of the family, works as associate pastor. This youth group ties together three of the five stories and serves as the catalyst for Russ’s unrest.

The book opens with Russ lusting after Frances Cottrell, a widowed parishioner who has just recently joined First Reformed. To win time with her, he convinces her to join the group of women who go into Chicago on a regular basis to volunteer at another church. Her son has joined the Crossroads youth group, but that doesn’t concern Russ at first. Instead, he is giddily consumed by thoughts of Frances, and Franzen leans hard into the irony of a pastor using his official church activities to advance his adulterous plans. The more we learn of Russ’s lust, the more we find it rooted in the humiliation he feels at work and home.