Corrections: Jonathan Franzen’s “Crossroads” Marks a Cultural Turn
REVIEW ESSAY
Crossroads: A Novel
by Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 592 pages
The most striking feature of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Crossroads, is its sexual conservatism. The novel is an ambitious, almost six-hundred-page first installment of a family trilogy which has an equally ambitious title, A Key to All Mythologies. Yet for all the statements it makes—about altruism, about the dangers of over-indulgence in navel-gazing individualism, about the inefficacy of social justice, about mental illness, about faith in God and redemption, about liberalism and religion—it’s sex where Franzen seems to have the most to say.
Crossroads is both formulaic and moralistic, and it’s not very demanding from a literary perspective. I remarked to a friend while reading it, without any irony, that it reminded me of Harry Potter. Or maybe, more generously, A Christmas Carol. Yet I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a bad book.
Crossroads is a great book. It’s well-written, cinematic, and entertaining. And its clear, unambiguous lessons are lessons that readers need to be reminded of—in some cases, long to be reminded of. In a world filled with uncritical messages about the importance of introspection, self-expression, and sexual liberation, Crossroads calls into question whether all this freedom to look inward has done us all that much good.
The conclusion it comes to is clearly no.
Damaged Goods
Set in the 1970s in a fictional suburb of Chicago, we open on patriarch Russ Hildebrandt, a former Mennonite and associate minister at First Reformed Church, who is haunted by a mysterious professional humiliation as he grapples with a crush he’s nursing on a parishioner, the middle-aged widow Frances Cottrell. At first teased as an affair, it’s revealed that Russ’s “humiliation” was his expulsion from the titular Crossroads, a youth group he led at his church, several years prior. During their annual spring trip to a Navajo reservation in Arizona, the teenagers staged a revolt against him.
The kids didn’t like the way he preached; they didn’t like the way he made them pray. It made them sick, and if he didn’t go, then they would. Led by two caustic teenage girls, Sally Perkins and Laura Dobrinsky, Russ was punished for the sin of being a square. A blow to his ego, to be sure, but also a great injustice. As told by Russ, it was a scandalizing display of adolescent cruelty. Maybe Russ was uncool, but “who cared if an ordained minister still carried a Bible and started every meeting with a metaphysical prayer?” Isn’t that what ministers are supposed to do?
There to mediate the conflict was the charismatic and much younger Rick Ambrose, who had assisted Russ in leading the group. Unfortunately, Rick’s attempts to defend Russ were unsuccessful, something Russ thought may have been designed. Russ was convinced that Rick had been drunk on his desire for power. Russ, who had been a faithful servant of God, a shepherd of these adolescents, was the victim of a coup. It was a conspiracy to replace him with someone younger and cooler, someone who better fit the free love zeitgeist of the late ’60s and early ’70s, someone who was more than happy to take the mantle.
Back in the present day, part of Russ still wonders who could blame these kids. He’s internalized the attack on his hipness, chiding himself, “Russ stepped back and was mortified by what he saw . . . the fatuousness of thinking he would ever be as hip as Ambrose.” But all this handwringing about coolness and masculine bravado misses the most important part of the conflict, a piece that’s underplayed by Russ.
It emerges that Russ’s problems with these teenagers did not arise simply because he was a square. It wasn’t simply that his prayer style didn’t jive with the looser, more hippie-inspired vibe that Rick introduced to the group. What catalyzed the group’s distaste for him was an incident a month prior with Sally Perkins.
During her parents’ divorce, Sally had gone to Russ for spiritual guidance. At some point during their conversation, Russ confided in Sally that he’d lost attraction to his wife, complaining about his sexual boredom. To Russ, this confession was a sure sign of a growing connection between him and Sally. Sally, on the other hand, left his office feeling violated. In her words, she was “creeped out.” While Sally doesn’t quite make the spectacle of this violation that she could have—and that would have been expected of her had this story unfolded in the current year—it does inspire her distaste for him.
Russ has an insatiable desire to be seen as a sexual being, a habit that persistently clouds his judgment. As the details of his humiliation are revealed, his present-day relationship with Frances Cottrell, at first just portrayed as an innocent crush, becomes treacherous terrain. Now that we’ve learned of what transpired with Sally Perkins, the reader can’t help but wonder if he’s misinterpreting Cottrell’s friendliness and taking advantage of a widow trying to connect with her church community.
With this new doubt cast on his judgment, Russ’s absorption with his crush is even more alarming. Perhaps Russ is the predator that Sally and Laura say he is, or at best, he’s just delusional. Fortunately for Russ’s ego, he does have a good read on Frances. Frances does like him, and the two have a short, torrid affair.
After what we can now only imagine was endless, fruitless seeking, Russ has at last found a woman willing to give what he’s most longed for: confirmation that he is sexually desirable. At one point, he deludes himself into thinking that pursuing this affair is a positive Christian act, that “joyfully making love with a joyful woman” is just one unconventional way of following Christ’s teachings.
But when Russ consummates his desire for Frances, what does he really gain? A deeper relationship with Christ? Higher self-esteem? A greater love than what he shared with his wife Marion? Special insight into the nature of desire? No, his single-minded pursuit of Frances drives a rift between him and his older son, Clem, and causes him to overlook his son Perry’s drug abuse and subsequent mental health crisis (incidentally, brought on by Perry’s unchecked self-indulgence and obsession with navel-gazing).
But that’s not to say that Russ gains nothing. Somewhere in this mess is the realization that perhaps the reason he had a wandering eye is because he felt like his wife Marion was damaged goods when they got married. And herein lies a curiously recurring theme: the value of sexual restraint:
On his bad days, he saw [himself as] a rube from Indiana who’d been pounced on by an older city girl—snared by the sexual cunning of a woman who’d developed it with a different man. On his worst days, he suspected Marion had known very well that he could have done better. . . . She had seduced him into a contract before he knew his value in the marketplace.
Though Russ loves his wife, or at least he thinks he does, her sexual experience inspired in him a lifelong crisis of masculinity. In the back of his mind had always hung the gnawing thought that there was a sexual partner before him, someone he was being compared to. And he was seeking relief from this anxiety: this, he realizes, was at the bottom of his fascination with both Frances and Sally. But why should the reader believe that this is anything more than one of Russ’s post hoc rationalizations for his lustfulness?
Strings Attached
As we get to know Marion, we realize that perhaps Russ’s insecurity isn’t so unfounded. Though it’s Russ she has children with, it’s Bradley, the married man to whom she lost her virginity, who looms large in Marion’s psyche, idealized and unattainable, “the one who got away.”
And further, the tragedy of Marion and Bradley’s love affair wasn’t that they didn’t end up together; it was that she “gave it away too easily,” and became irrevocably damaged by a relationship predicated on sex, not love. Sex which, again and again, plays a Satanic trick on women: it’s no substitute for a relationship, nor for love, but it creates a convincing illusion of a connection.
Early in the book, a therapist, one of two feminist mouthpieces in the novel, says to Marion:
Listen to your assumptions. You were lucky to find someone to marry you? Why? What was so wrong with you? You were sexually experienced? You’d had a nervous breakdown? Would that have been a problem if you were male? Would you have been lucky to find a wife? And why was it so important to be married in the first place? Because a woman isn’t really a woman if she can’t find a husband and procreate?
To the therapist and the modern reader, these questions are rhetorical. But in Crossroads, they are direly unsettled. Marion’s sexual experience may not have made her an irredeemable person, but the intense pain it wrought shaped who she is. It transformed her, and arguably not for the better. Sex is never neutral. There is no such thing as a sexual relationship without consequences. It impacts your sexual appetite and proclivities; your ability to trust; your self-perception; the strength of relationships you’re able to have in the future.
We’re often told by feminists that taboos around sex exist because society is fearful of unbounded pleasure (as though that doesn’t come with its own dangers). Because that bogeyman, the patriarchy, wants to prevent people from being “too happy.” It wants to control how we behave. It has a cloying obsession with women’s bodies.
Crossroads suggests that, instead, those taboos exist to protect us from pain that nobody should experience. That the stigma of “being a slut” is less about making women feel poorly about their choices and more about preventing them from making those choices in the first place, in the same way we punish our kids if we catch them trying to stick a fork in an outlet. If you’re not careful, you’ll get hurt. This, of course, brings up another, more difficult question to answer.
What are the social consequences of being a hurt person? It’s not that hurt people aren’t deserving of our acceptance—of course they are. But why do we operate on the assumption that there is no sacrifice involved in loving a hurt person, in helping them heal? If we find someone willing to grant us that kind of grace, that kind of patience, should we feel “lucky”? To Marion’s therapist’s point, was Marion lucky that Russ married her? This is the question that Crossroads attempts to answer.
It may be that “luck” is the wrong frame here, but Marion’s marriage to Russ was redemptive for her. It was only when Marion married Russ and had children, who persist throughout the novel as a singular joy in her life, that she found any semblance of peace, if not a constant peace. Marion came to Russ from a dark place, with a lot of emotional baggage from her tryst with Bradley, which in turn put a strain on her relationship with Russ, a strain that continues throughout the book. And he helped deliver her into a place of light, even if her demons continued to haunt her.
Hip to Be Square
Crossroads is an almost Dickensian novel in which characters are smote proportionally to how much they indulge in their most carnal desires. Usually this comes to us by way of sex, with one glaring exception: Marion and Russ’s son Perry, whose attraction is to drugs.
Their daughter Becky seems to be the only one among the lot who makes it out happily. Becky is a good conservative girl who restrains herself from indulgence, but not quite long enough. So she gets half-smote: an unplanned pregnancy that robs her of a comfortable life, and her husband of a lucrative music career, but they still get a happy, if mundane, family life out of it.
Boredom and rules-following are a small price to pay considering the chaos of secular, or at least more secular, life. Russ might have been happier had he never left his Mennonite community because, though it was held together by stringent, unforgiving social norms, those norms lent it a stability and welcomed predictability.
Perry, Russ and Marion’s drug-addled middle son, certainly would have fared much better in a world not only where drugs were more strictly punished, but where his tendency to introspect wasn’t confused with genius. And to the question of sex—the novel’s central preoccupation—Crossroads isn’t afraid to confront a reality that feels like it’s been forgotten. And in some cases, more than forgotten, flat-out denied.
Sex has emotional and physical consequences, and there’s nothing we can do to get around that. Sex is not like any other thing you can do with a person. It makes men hedonistic; women become perilously attached. And like all of life’s temptations—food, cigarettes, drink, drugs—it’s addictive. Once you get a taste, it’s possible, even likely, you won’t have the strength to stop, even if it ruins you.
There’s no supernatural reason behind this, either; it’s just who we are as people. Even if birth control can prevent unintended pregnancy, and abortion can snuff it out completely, there is nothing we can do to change the fact that women pair-bond during sex. And there’s nothing we can do about the fact that men have a natural appetite for it, which left unchecked can cause ruin to them and to their loved ones.
In the years following the sexual revolution, refitting reality to suit our needs became the norm. We prescribed birth control like it was candy. We encouraged women to “shout their abortions,” treating pregnancy termination not as inconsequential but, rather, something to take pride in. We conditioned women out of “catching feelings” for the men they sleep with, as though emotional attachment is a disease. For so long, culture has instructed us that the consequences of sex would be optional, if only society were more open-minded.
But Crossroads questions that premise. It says that we can’t change reality. We can, however, create safeguards to protect us from ourselves. Our safeguards are our families, our churches, our social norms. The risk of pregnancy, norms around marriage, taboos around premarital sex, these things keep us safe as much as modern culture claims they hold us back. Unbounded by these norms, we aren’t freer. The so-called chains of stigma free us from the burden of the pain that they’re designed to prevent.
Was Marion lucky that Russ married her? Yes, she was.
A Shift in the Zeitgeist
Today, Franzen is not the only person questioning the premises of “free love.” Which makes it curious that absent from the novel’s critical reception so far are almost any discussions of sex—though, unusually for Franzen, the book has received a muted response more generally. (Perhaps this is merely another indicator of the waning relevance of the novel as a form, or at least novels that are nearly six hundred pages long.) Scanning reviews, critics discuss its religiosity; its quaint backdrop of 1970s midwestern suburbs; the ongoing duel between vanity and Christlikeness; the consequences of personal humiliation and the hatred that can spring from it. But no review published in a major outlet touched on what’s arguably the heart of the story.
If there’s anything that can be reliably said of Jonathan Franzen, it’s that he understands the American zeitgeist, and each of his books has captured something important about the moment they were published in. It’s only fitting that, in 2021, sexual morality would take center stage.
In the last few years, the tides have started to shift on how we think about sex and love, a delayed backlash perhaps to the long shadow of the 1960s’ free love ethos. In 2021, in the Spectator, “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington wrote about the coming “sexual counterrevolution.” (Incidentally, her piece became the most read Spectator article of the year.) America’s elite is turning against free love, she wrote, describing a new class of educated young people who were pushing back against sexual liberation. The thing that stood out to her most? These young people weren’t Christian fundamentalists nor were they even necessarily right-wing. They were simply reacting to what they perceived as an oversaturation of hypersexuality in the culture.
Months later, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times reported something strikingly similar in her article, “Why Sex Positivity Is Falling Out of Fashion.” If sex positivity wasn’t passé to everyone, it was at a minimum under renewed scrutiny by college-educated women, who had felt led astray by a “pornified” and overly permissive world.
But the conversation did not stop at these articles by Goldberg and Harrington. It seemed like everyone had something to say about the value of more traditional sexual attitudes, on the left, right, and center. The year 2021 was filled with reconsiderations and reexaminations. Articles with titles like “Call It Sex Negativity or Common Sense, There’s a Backlash around the Corner” and “On Sex Negativity” went viral on what felt like a weekly basis. UnHerd published my own “Sex Positivity Can’t Last,” which explored Tumblr’s influence on sex positivity’s popularity in the 2010s, and the countermovement that seemed to be developing among young people. Buzzfeed published an exposé about how Zoomer women were pushing back against sexual moral relativism and were more likely to be skeptical about topics like kinky sex.
The ethics of porn came under scrutiny. The CEO of PornHub became the victim of arson, while the website was exposed as complicit in the distribution of both revenge porn and child pornography. Vox investigated Zoomers’ ongoing crusade to get pornography taken off TikTok. Recently, involuntary celibates (incels) received more compassionate treatment by figures like Alex Lee Moyer, Naama Kates, and Rob Henderson, cast in a more nuanced light as casualties of the sexual revolution as opposed to “male supremacist terrorists,” as had been the norm in years prior. Major television networks hosted debates with central questions like, “Has the Sexual Revolution caused more harm than good?” It felt like this was one of the most hotly contested ideas of the year.
And the conversation only continued as the year marched on: women began to question the safety of hormonal birth control, proposing that maybe natural cycle tracking was the healthier alternative. Fertility, too, was a major consideration, as older millennial women wondered both in think pieces and on social media if they’d been led astray by the notion that women really can have it all. Many tragically concluded that they would have been happier as mothers, as opposed to career women; something that would have been viewed as retrograde or even unspeakable a year or two earlier.
Young women began to speak out on platforms like TikTok about being misled about the “glamor” of sex work, stripping, OnlyFans, and being a sugar baby, which had long been understood as edgy and unduly stigmatized at worst, and a backdoor to a more exciting, fulfilling life at best. Media personalities, reporters, and feminists heralded the end of the iconic 2010s “girl boss,” now recast as an unfair lie designed to imprison women in the same rat race that had done so much harm to men.
On the often sexually risqué podcast Red Scare, cohost Anna Khachiyan described her deep remorse at having multiple abortions, which sparked a larger conversation on social media and on Reddit about how we had been too flippant about the gravity of the procedure in the 2010s. Activist and journalist Louise Perry announced her upcoming book, The Case against the Sexual Revolution, and Amia Srinivasan published hers, The Right to Sex, to great acclaim. As we entered 2022, musical artist Billie Eilish confessed that she had been watching porn since she was eleven and felt that it had done irreparable damage to her self-image. The list goes on, and a full inventory of our changing attitudes around sex could occupy several pages itself.
And while there’s no surefire way to track conversations happening on the ground, internet analytics tell a similar story to headlines. Search a keyword like “sex negativity” on a social listening tool like Awario, which tracks conversations happening on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and blogs, and you’ll discover that mentions exploded by nearly 300 percent. If you do the same for negative-sentiment conversations around topics like “liberal feminism” or “girl boss feminism,” the numbers are even more staggering. So high, in fact, one wonders if they can be correct: they’re up by thousands of percentage points. A quick review of what, precisely, these conversations are, again, reveals that it’s not conservative religious populations, older generations, self-identified anti-feminists, or the intersection of all three speaking. It’s primarily women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—of all races, religious backgrounds, and professions—who are fed up.
Considering the weight and ubiquity of these topics, it’s even more surprising that Crossroads, which confronts many of these issues head-on, received so little attention for its engagement with sexuality. Like so many of Franzen’s books, it was published at the perfect time—the book for its moment.
Perhaps the established gatekeepers of literary culture are still hesitant to question yesterday’s pieties. Or perhaps they didn’t make it to the end, and only took what they were able to glean from the first fifty to a hundred pages. It’s only by the end of the novel that the reader is truly able to appreciate what Franzen is saying about sexuality. Or perhaps the novel, especially one as long as Crossroads, has finally gone out of fashion, just as the values of the sexual revolution have.