Jonathan Franzen's ‘Crossroads’ Rethinks God, Sin And Salvation In Its Search For Redemption

(REVIEW) Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, “Crossroads,” testifies to humanity’s desperate, unremitting search for grace and ability to find it in unlikely places.

The novel follows five members of a dysfunctional Midwestern U.S. family in the early 1970s — the Rev. Russ Hildebrandt, his wife Marion, their daughter Becky and sons Clem and Perry — who grapple with a paralyzing sense of unworthiness. As these characters search for redemption within and outside the sphere of faith, this novel — in a shift from much of Franzen’s prior writing — embraces the idea of finding salvation in Christ.

One of Franzen’s greatest strengths lies in characterization. Russ, Marion and Becky are particularly flawed but painfully relatable and psychologically intricate. Their struggles underlie the novel’s controlling idea that deep suffering is universal but often unseen. Franzen persuades readers to identify with the generally unlikeable Russ, whose story centers on his illicit relationship with an alluring young parishioner, Frances Cottrell. Russ spends the novel pursuing Frances and wrestling with the shame of his earlier banishment from the church youth group, called Crossroads, after his efforts to fit in with the popular crowd failed miserably.

Franzen creates an especially gripping representation of Marion, a frumpy middle-aged wife whose husband now finds her unattractive. Marion harbors the secret of a past affair, pregnancy, abortion, rape and institutionalization — a series of horrors that haunt her at each attempt toward healing. As for Becky, Franzen unfolds the graduating senior’s uneasy entry into Crossroads to spite her distant father, guilty hesitation over her relationship to eventual husband Tanner Evans and first genuine interest in spirituality.

“Crossroads” is compelling in its portrayal of human suffering as a collective phenomenon emerging from factors inside and outside the individual self, especially in Russ and Marion. Both characters carry damage from prior humiliation and helplessness, rejection by each other and a series of bad decisions. Together, the interweaving stories reveal the texture of brokenness — a web of prior injury, personal guilt and social disgrace that is too tangled to unravel and impossible to resolve on one’s own.

In response, the novel sets out to question assumptions about where God must be found. Russ encounters God in the spiritual serenity of a Navajo reservation among other places. Marion finds spiritual healing in the Roman Catholic Church as well as the sight of a Santa Claus attending to joyful children. And Becky, high and conscience stricken, meets Christ in a church sanctuary just after smoking marijuana.

While the novel is intent on exploring the healing power of God — Christ, specifically — its concept of salvation deliberately sidesteps biblical notions of sin and repentance. Early on, “Crossroads” juxtaposes two competing “gospels”: At war in the souls of Marion and the rest of her family are a gospel of “guilt and damnation” and a gospel of “community and love.”

In the novel’s paradigm, these two gospels are mutually exclusive. Guilt does not come from sin as an act of evil that must be acknowledged and repented but emerges as a construct that aims to condemn. Individual guilt thus becomes something to be largely forgotten in the focus on the joy Christ offers those who would humble themselves. If the novel arrives at a clear concept of spirituality, it is what Becky articulates in the closing pages while overcoming her moral conviction about premarital sex: “Only love and worship matter.”  

Sidestepping biblical theology further, the novel moves from the principle that sin is a construct that can be overcome by love to the suggestion that salvation can be found in the process of breaking an established moral code — a proposition that has not only clear theological implications but also some possibly unintended ethical ones.

The suggestion emerges from the novel’s distinctive approach to the so-called Faustian bargain. Crossroads, it turns out, is not only the name of the youth group but the title of a prized possession of Russ Hildebrandt — a blues album by jazz musician Robert Johnson, who was famed to have stood at a crossroads when he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for skill with the guitar. The pact with the devil goes back to the centuries-old Faust legend, where a man bargains away his soul for worldly greatness before suffering the consequences — typically damnation — at death.

In “Crossroads,” as in the Faust legend, each main character finds themselves at a metaphorical crossroads, tempted to make a devilish pact. For Becky and Russ, this takes the form of a sexual encounter that creates deep qualms — Becky with her boyfriend and Russ with Cottrell. But Becky overcomes her moral conviction and Russ his scruples as both consummate their respective relationships.

Here Franzen makes his most significant modification to the traditional Faust legend. In nearly all versions, the pact ends in destruction for the protagonist, but in Franzen’s novel, these devilish deals have curiously salvific implications. In sleeping with Tanner, Becky finds escape from her searing bitterness. When Russ consummates his affair with Frances while chaperoning a youth retreat, he considers her participation an act of grace that saves him. In the novel’s paradigm, making a deal with the devil serves as a means of salvation.

In making this so, Franzen recalls the most famous of all the Faust legends: Goethe’s, where the protagonist notoriously wins his wager with the devil and avoids not only damnation but significant suffering as well. To put off feelings of pain and guilt, Faust bathes in the River Lethe to forget the upsetting events of the first half of the play. The logic of Goethe’s “Faust” seems intriguingly similar to that of Franzen’s characters: They are blessed because they are taking risks — as Becky’s youth group leader tells her when first suggesting she pursue Tanner — and learning the limits of self-reproach.

That Franzen could put his novel into conversation with “Faust” is a testament to his skill in writing such rich characters and raising profound philosophical and moral questions. Yet “Crossroads” accordingly leaves behind its own version of Goethe’s Gretchen, the young woman who perishes in prison at the end of “Faust,” part one, after Faust impregnates her. The episode was Goethe’s unique addition and troubled critics then and now.

In “Crossroads,” the parallel to Gretchen would be Marion, whose conclusion likewise seems to be superficially resolved: Gretchen is saved and intercedes spiritually for Faust at the conclusion to the work, just as Marion achieves a happy reunion with Russ. This too feels unsatisfying in ways reminiscent of responses to Goethe’s 19th century masterpiece.

Since Marion, like Goethe, brushes aside a doctrine of sin and guilt, she unwittingly denies herself a methodology for acknowledging the wrongs that were done to her and limits meaningful reconciliation with the husband who betrayed her. Despite having been badly neglected by Russ, Marion concludes that she cannot hold him accountable for his affair without condemning herself — for having pushed away his advances, withheld from him the knowledge of her past and seriously toyed with having an affair herself.

Perhaps even more puzzling, the novel implies that since she had an affair before their marriage, she and Russ are therefore “even” after his affair with Frances — a principle the novel does not appear to question. This variant of the “judge not lest you be judged” ethic seems to leave its espousers dangerously open to victimization and abuse.

Russ and Marion’s reunion thus leaves a somewhat vague portrait of love and justice — and what it means to love those we have deeply injured and those who have injured us and may continue to do so. Whether avoiding the issue or deferring until the second or third parts of the trilogy, “Crossroads” disregards the doctrine that divine love is inseparable from justice and, in turn, from a robust concept of sin.

Traditionally, the good news of the gospel is good because humans understand they are deeply flawed beings who wrong God and one another — grace prompts not an ignoring of self but a dying to self, a condemnation of behaviors that wrong God and others. The grace offered in “Crossroads” is rather nebulous by comparison.

Of course, this nebulousness may be precisely the point, deemed necessary to the unbounded picture of God that “Crossroads” develops. Russ and Marion find their greatest satisfaction in worshipping a deity unconfined by Scripture, doctrine, tradition or individual conscience, experiencing a version of grace that asks nothing beyond refraining from judgment.

In this theology, “Crossroads” repeatedly asks readers not to limit the ways God might work, even if the suggestion that he might be found in sin could limit or distort the work of grace. But perhaps the two novels to come will have more to say — and show — on this very question.

Kelly Lehtonen is an assistant professor of English at The King's College in New York City, where she teaches courses in writing and Western literature.