To its craft and credit, Crossroads pulls the reader in, to the expense of anything around, letting us lose ourselves “in characters and locals” as Franzen wanted in 1996. It is so slow, so private, so internal, so psychically subterranean, yet also intensely particular, that it underscores everything that a novel, uniquely as an art form, can do.įranzen has not written a Social Novel. It is so unlike the way new stories-or Stories ™, as co-opted by Instagram and Facebook-now work that it is something like the opposite of news. There is, by design, nothing new in Crossroads. At the same time, as the title implies, Franzen again seems to be breaking from his previous work, this time against the Perchance to Dream” imperative to use the novel as a way to bring news to the mainstream. Like its predecessors, it focuses on a familiar Midwestern nuclear family, the Hildebrandts, in familiar domestic crises. And they were also about Feelings and Family.įranzen’s new novel, Crossroads, at first glance continues the pattern. They were personal but, at least metaphorically, political, announcing their Big Social Novel intentions on their Big Social Novel sleeves and in their Big Social Novel Titles: The Corrections (2001)! Freedom (2010)! Purity (2015)! They were about America, and The Way We Live Now.

These post-millennial novels managed to feel both provincial and national, with a dash of the conspiratorial and ironic. The post-“Perchance” novels seemed more aligned with the sense and sensibly of 19th Century British writers like Charles Dickens than, say, Joseph Heller, whom he names in his essay. In keeping with his title’s allusion to Hamlet, he used the words “depression” and “despair” liberally, concluding, “At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between my feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales that I loved.”Įach of his novels since has attempted to do both, or at least split the difference, moving away, but only partially, from the Pynchon-esque postmodernism of his earlier work. There, he lamented what he saw as the demise of the social novel and fiction’s diminished role in American culture as a whole. In 1996, coming off moderate success with his first two literary fiction novels – The Twenty–Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992) – Franzen wrote an essay for Harper’s called “Perchance to Dream”. Jonathan Franzen has been at a crossroads before.

Resurrection bay novel