Crossroads

Crossroads, published in October 2021, is Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel. Like Franzen’s most famous novel, The Corrections, published in 2001 and recipient of the National Book Award, Crossroads is a family drama. It tells the story of the Hildebrandts, a middle-class family in 1970s New Prospect, a fictional suburb of Chicago. Russ, the father, is an associate minister at First Reformed Presbyterian Church, while Marion is a stay-at-home mother to siblings Clem, Becky, Perry, and Judson.

This study guide addresses topics that include drug use, sexual assault, and suicide.

Plot Summary

Crossroads is structured in two parts: “Advent” and “Easter.” Each part contains sections that shift between the points of view of five of the six members of the Hildebrandt family: father Russ, mother Marion, and siblings Clem, Becky, and Perry. Only the youngest sibling, Judson, is not represented as a point-of-view character. In the opening of Part 1, “Advent,” Russ, an associate pastor at a Presbyterian church in the Hildebrandts’ Chicago suburb, contemplates an affair with his one of his parishioners, Frances Cottrell. Throughout Part 1, Russ increases the frequency of his interactions with Frances, trying to inch ever closer to a romantic and sexual relationship. The reader also learns through flashbacks that Russ hates his fellow associate pastor, Rick Ambrose. The two used to lead the church’s youth group Crossroads together, but they had a falling out when several of the teens tried to kick Russ out of the group and Rick did nothing to prevent it.

Marion, Russ’s wife, feels invisible in her daily life in New Prospect. Her whole family sees her just as a caretaker, and she has no real friends. She begins seeing a therapist, unbeknownst to anyone in the family, and at one of her appointments she reveals the full story of her past that no one in her family knows. As a girl, her father killed himself. Subsequently, Marion moved to Los Angeles where she began an affair with a car salesman, Bradley Grant, and quickly started showing signs of a mental health experience. She developed an unhealthy obsession with Bradley and also had periods of total dissociation from which she would awake with bruises and scars. When Bradley dumped her, her mental health worsened. By the time she realized she was pregnant with Bradley’s child, she was penniless and about to be evicted, so she agreed to be repeatedly raped by an elderly man in exchange for which he arranged a back-alley abortion. Afterward, she was committed to a mental institution.

In the story’s present, reciting these details to her therapist unlocks the potency of the memories, which Marion has buried for decades. When she leaves the office, she begins acting like a different person, taking up smoking and finding evidence that Russ is having an affair with Frances, just as she suspected.

Clem, the eldest Hildebrandt child, is a college student who decides to drop out of college so he can be eligible to be drafted for the Vietnam War. He breaks up with his girlfriend in anticipation of soon being sent overseas and then goes home to New Prospect for his holiday break. He and Becky have always been extremely close, but when she senses that he disapproves of her new boyfriend, she lashes out at him. Not wanting to remain in New Prospect for the holiday, he boards a bus bound for New Orleans.

Becky, a high school junior, is one of the most popular and beautiful girls in New Prospect. She faces a difficult decision: Her Aunt Shirley, who recently died, left her $13,000 to take a lavish European vacation. Russ and Marion, however, want her to split the money with her siblings. While trying to make this decision, Becky meets a popular and good-looking young man who recently graduated from her high school, Tanner Evans. She joins Crossroads, which he attended while in high school, and begins attending Sunday church services just to see more of him. Eventually, she comes to devote herself to Christianity genuinely.

Perry, the third-born Hildebrandt sibling and a high school sophomore, is extremely intelligent but often feels alone. While most of his friends smoke marijuana and drink, he smokes the most. When Marion grows increasingly worried about Perry’s behavior, afraid that he may have inherited her family’s mental health issues, she tells him the truth about her family so that he knows the risks. This only makes him feel worse. He gets back into drugs, eventually connecting with a dealer who encourages him to try amphetamines.

In Part 2, “Easter,” Russ rejoins Crossroads and attends the annual spring trip to Arizona where the group does manual labor for a Navajo reservation. Although Perry shows blaring warning signs of drug addiction leading up to the trip, Russ still lets him come along. While on the trip, which Frances also attends as a chaperone, Frances is very impressed with how Russ handles a disaffected Navajo youth who is frustrated that the group has come. Afterward, she and Russ have sex in an abandoned building. When they return, authorities are waiting to tell them that Perry has been arrested.

In the months leading up to the trip, Perry first became addicted to cocaine. Though Becky eventually decided to split her inheritance money with her brothers, Perry used all of his $3,000 and then stole all of Clem’s $3,000 to fund his drug purchases. To get the money back, he sets up a deal with some local Navajos in Arizona to buy a large batch of peyote wholesale, which he plans to sell to his suburban peers at a markup. The plan goes awry: Perry gets robbed and abandoned by the men who were supposed to help him with the deal, and then is so high on his walk back to the camp that he accidentally burns down a farm building while trying to start a fire for warmth.

During the Arizona trip, Marion is in Los Angeles with Judson. She has taken him there, allegedly, to visit her sickly uncle, but really because she plans to reunite with Bradley, who still lives there and is now divorced. They do meet up, but she finds him vaguely pathetic, realizing she never actually loved him and can now put their affair behind her. Returning, she is greeted with the news of Perry’s arrest with a phone call from Russ, who tells her that Perry has been arrested and that he is now being held in a hospital because he tried to kill himself. She flies to meet Russ and the two reconcile, finally realizing they have been neglecting Perry in their own selfish pursuits. They realize their lives will now be devoted to helping Perry recover and trying to pay the enormous sums of his legal bills and arson damage.

Becky and Clem both wander away from the family in Part 2. Becky starts clinging ever closer to Tanner. After Perry’s crisis, her parents take her portion of Aunt Shirley’s money to help pay their mounting debts, and Becky feels betrayed. She uses and Tanner get married and have a child, a girl they name Gracie. Becky does not soften toward her parents and Perry, however, and maintains merely an icy politeness when she sees them around town.

Clem’s plan to join the military is foiled when he never gets drafted. He learns about the ongoing coldness between Becky and his parents in one of Marion’s letters. He, too, has been on Becky’s bad side ever since they argued about Tanner, and he realizes he can no longer stand this; Becky has always been the person he loves most in the world. Back in New Prospect, Becky tells him that Marion wants her to come over for Easter dinner, but she is not going to, instead hosting Tanner’s parents at her house. She invites Clem, and he realizes she is telling him to make a choice: Side with either her or Russ and Marion. Clem would prefer not to choose, but the novel ends by saying that he has made a choice, though not specifying which one.