Franzen Crossroads

It is a big deal to me when a new Jonathan Franzen novel comes come out. They seem to come at five-year intervals on average.

I found The Corrections to be an elevated form of fiction when I read it as a young adult. I was enjoying whatever else I had been reading, but then I realized Franzen writes on another level. The depth of the characters he develops and their interactions with each other is sublime.

I enjoyed his subsequent novels, Freedom and Purity. I don't think he could write a bad novel. But Crossroads stands out for having Franzen's masterful writing focus on, as he noted in a recent New Yorker Radio Hour episode, very ordinary characters. Freedom involved a indie rocker and Purity a family's secret fortune. In Crossroads, the characters are vivid and feel real. They suffer and act stupidly. But they are fairly ordinary. The choice of characters makes me wonder if Franzen could write about a family as plain and mine or yours with the same power, and I think the answer is yes. Every human has depth and inner conflict. Each family unit contains strife.

Franzen states that Crossroads in the first book in a planned trilogy. He planned for Crossroads to work as a standalone novel, and it does. That seems wise, because at the rate that he releases novels, that is a 15-year project. Perhaps they will be printed at shorter intervals because the three books are one project. But it pains me as fan to be waiting for him to slowly release his work.