The Crossroads crew is touchy-feely, perhaps overly so. His use of rich period detail is spot-on, from sheepskin jackets to group hugs to two-faced cliques. It’s a credit to Franzen that he re-creates these characters and their nexus of sex and salvation in a nostalgic yet immediate way. Crossroads is the heart of Crossroads, a mesh of bad boys and mean girls, adolescent ids and adult egos, striving to save souls while getting some on the side. Pious and self-regarding, Russ holds himself aloof not only from his wife, Marion, who ghost-writes his sermons, but also from their children: Clem, a sex-addled University of Illinois student Becky, the queen bee of her high school sophomore Perry, an existentialist weed dealer whose IQ rides high in the 160s and the angelic nine-year-old Judson, oblivious to his family’s impending doom.įranzen begins in media res: a few years earlier Russ, in charge of Crossroads, the youth outreach program, was tossed over for the younger, hipper Rick Ambrose, following a disastrous annual mission to a Navajo reservation in Arizona. In his late 40s, Russ Hildebrandt is the financially strapped associate pastor of First Reformed and New Prospect, in an affluent and very white suburb of Chicago. He pays homage to great 19th-century social realists, from George Eliot to Balzac to Dickens, while gazing unflinchingly to the ills that shape us today. Crossroads is set during Advent-mostly a single day, December 23-and the following Easter with a coda a couple of years in the future but in classic Franzen style he folds decades of backstory into his frame while meticulously following his through line. Jonathan Franzen’s sweeping, sumptuous new novel, Crossroads, peers back at this oddball moment, post-Manson Family and pre-Watergate, when Jesus was groovy and Nixon’s America teetered beneath the stresses of Vietnam and (closer to home) the ravages of drug use and infidelity. Evenings teenagers would gather, singing folk-music hymns with spooky minor chords: We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord./And we pray that our unity may one day be restored.

The men would labor a week, perhaps two, mixing concrete to erect prefab chapels while the women taught Vacation Bible School. He founded a ministry known as “God’s Minority,” which traveled each summer to disadvantaged towns in West Virginia and Connecticut. I’d just entered grade school when my cousin was called to serve as youth pastor of my Baptist church in Tennessee. Few Gen Xers and zero millennials will recall, but there was a moment-call it 1971–when Protestant Christianity met the counterculture, when teenagers brimmed over with faith, hope, and love while wearing bell-bottom jeans and beaded necklaces, strumming guitars, even cursing and drinking beer.

Crossroads franzen characters