crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen

His mode is so consistent that it’s become a brand: the granular depiction of domestic life filtered, via happenstance and the mechanics of plot, through the cultural concerns of whatever historical moment in which the book was written. “Franzen’s intensely absorbing novel is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting?in a word, exquisite.Over the span of five novels, dropped every five years or so like stepping stones into the river of our national zeitgeist, Jonathan Franzen has taught his readers what to expect from him. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years. By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the center. Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories.

Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has veered into the era’s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father.

The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless-unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. It’s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. 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.

Crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen