crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen

(Readers who prefer his breakout 2001 novel, The Corrections, will surely welcome this.) For Russ, who organizes volunteer work in the inner city and at a Navajo reservation, the ’70s bring a humiliating shift in identity. Unlike Franzen’s previous two novels, 2010’s Freedom and 2015’s Purity, Crossroads is light on curmudgeonly social commentary. The social change convulsing America in 1971 only lightly shapes the crises that beset the Hildebrandts. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis.

Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless-unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it.

Download the first chapter of Jonathan Franzen's next novel, Crossroads.It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago.

Crossroads chapter sampler jonathan franzen