Russ, in his self-absorption, is determined to frame his wife, Marion, as loyal, docile and straightforward, when in fact she’s as knotted and dissatisfied as he is, a woman who has hidden her history and buried her trauma.

We hear from Clem, his disillusioned eldest popular Becky, intent on carving out an identity of her own and precocious 14-year-old Perry, who is clearly courting disaster. But there are no supporting characters in Franzen’s bulging family sagas: these are all-star affairs, and so the focus duly shifts from Russ to his children. But, in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big midwestern family.īy turns principled and petty, laudable and ludicrous, Russ is broad-shouldered enough to carry Crossroads on his own. Crossroads, his splendid sixth novel, comes billed as the first part of a proposed trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, named after Edward Casaubon’s absurd, unfinished tract in Middlemarch. New Prospect is in a state of flux but Jonathan Franzen remains reliably, defiantly Franzen-esque, tending to his faltering flock in fair weather or foul, and whatever the ructions in the country at large.

This might be God or family or a fresh myth to believe in, a 20th-century pursuit-of-happiness tale, self-authored if need be. Inside the First Reformed church, the worshippers are attempting to ride out the storm, casting about for something rock solid and true. T he times are a-changing in solid, respectable New Prospect, Illinois, where Christmas 1971 arrives in a whirl of sex, drugs and folk music, while the Vietnam war grinds on off stage.

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