Franzen’s Crossroads

A Pastor’s View

The first thing to know about Crossroads is everything hinges on sex. Lots of sex. Sexual urges. Desire. Frustrations. First times. Cheating. Sometimes graphic, sometimes flirtatious, often odd, and sometimes horrific descriptions of sexual activities. Sexual violence, too.

If not sex, then drugs. First-time highs, overdoses, withdrawals, out-of-body experiences, and the like.

And in the end, the sex and drugs become the very definition of religion, the lynchpin upon which all spiritual experiences rest. Everyone is either running from or toward sex and drugs for the whole book, and only discover what they, the characters, think is God when they are within range of some high one way or another.

Covering one day (Christmas Eve), then another (Easter-ish), then a year of aftermath after those particular days, the book follows one family on the brink of disaster. A junior pastor at First Reformed, his estranged and broken wife, their eldest son at college, their daughter the popular kid in high school and the youth group (from which dad has been banned), and their next two sons (the first a drug addict, the second a kid who merely serves as background lighting for various emotional responses by parents and siblings).

The irony of reading this book as a pastor is that I do not resonate at all, not one scintilla, with the pastor figure of the book, the father of family at the center of Crossroads. Russ is selfish, sex-obsessed, money-obsessed, and frustrated by the failure of his desire to love others manifesting in any respect from the next generation. He marched with Stokely Carmichael, he repeats, a factoid that he believes should make him cool, but instead he is isolated, alone, and desirous of a sexual contest of a parishioner.

If anything, reading Russ puts me in the mind of some of the headlines I’ve read of late, of successful pastors, not failures, who are able to coast well enough on their success and control their little worlds so effectively that they can take sexual conquest of their parishes and followers. I am horrified by Russ, who thinks nothing of his mission beyond how it makes him feel. I am horrified by his family, each selfish to the nth degree in their own ways. I see nothing in the varieties of their religious experience in the lives of those I pastor or have known in my almost 40 years in Christendom. And when I’ve seen such brokenness, it was not all in one family.

In that way, the book is fascinating as entertainment but not at all useful as art. It shows me violence without hope. Indeed, it shows the meaninglessness of hope as hope-filled actions are mangled and destroyed. Spiritual journeys end in deflated nothingness. Help for people of color is merely a backdrop for revealing white people problems without any hope of genuine change. Everyone and everything is miserable. This is entertainment like rubbernecking is entertainment. Only it is so well crafted that it is like rubbernecking a head-on collision between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. It is a wreck you see coming a mile away. You just never know how bad it will get, so you keep reading.

As a Pastor who has encountered and counseled people who’ve encountered all the various traumas in Crossroads (though never in one family), I fail to see the value in recommending this book. It lakes the hopefulness in brokenness that you might get from Marilynn Robinson. It lacks the beauty of despair or the real dry encounter with the West you find with Cormac McCarthy. While it deals with grand themes of faith, forgiveness, despair, family, and more, it does not seek to give the audience anything new about those themes. This is an elaborately-written episode of Dr. Phil.

Perhaps the only saving grace is getting into the mind of suffering. I can feel the emotional wreckage of the abuse, failure, and mental illnesses of the characters. I can certainly feel the sexual desires of all of them save one (the drug addict too desirous of drugs to care much for sex). Because the book is well-crafted, I feel feelings that coincide with those characters that I would not otherwise feel since I am not going through their pain. But I also feel certain feelings when I, say, watch another man get hit in groin with a football. Just because the book opens the door to empathy because it is so there and so visceral doesn’t mean it helps me go anywhere with the characters or with my own emotional experiences.

In the end, Franzen leaves us hopeless save for intoxicants: sex and drugs. From a secular perspective, he may not be wrong. Perhaps Franzen is merely giving us the hopelessness of world. But he does not do it as beautifully as McCarthy does in Blood Meridian or as meaningfully as, say, Don DeLillo in Underworld. Most of all, there is no redemption here. Nothing good comes. It is Blood Meridian without anything fantastical to redeem it.

A nasty car wreck, however beautiful it may look, is still a disaster, and people around disasters really ought to help, not watch. With fiction, you can’t help. So why read it at all?