I miss Crossroads already

Franzen Fall concludes as we say goodbye to the Hildebrandts (for now)

I can hardly believe it, but this is the last post of Franzen Fall. Crossroads is over and oh, what a time it’s been. When we last saw them, Russ and Marion were at, well, a crossroads because Marion was getting her groove back (taking up smoking). But maybe what I read as a mental breakdown was actually a mental breakthrough because at least she’s no longer quietly miserable. Russ still doesn’t know what to do with this new and emboldened Marion who won’t do his laundry and sleeps in the attic: “Her coolness was worse than coldness. He had an urge to break into it, grab hold of her, impose his will. Their fight the night before had tapped into an unguessed reservoir of rage.”

Russ has what we will charitably call anger issues, but clearly he’s also kind of turned on.

Russ whenever anyone is mean to him

And then…after all this build up to Christmas…we skip over Christmas. Months go by in a few paragraphs, Perry is doing better (no he’s not, Russ), Marion is still pissed and smoking and shrinking, Russ in back in Crossroads, and as for Becky, Clem, and Judson…who cares. Not Russ! He only has eyes for Foxy Frances Cottrell.

He should really be paying attention to Marion, who’s now refusing to help him write his sermons. Instead, she’s attending lectures and going to theater performances (do you remember she loved acting, once upon a time?).

It’s Marion, except the role of Taye Diggs is played by a local theater troupe.

Meanwhile, Russ finds out that Frances smoked weed without him and he’s, predictably, a total baby about it. His obsession is so gross (and, seriously, I wish I could talk to Becky just to tell her “do NOT use that sink in the bathroom by your room!”) and Frances is so whatever about him. But he does get himself an invite to go over to her place and get high, where he sees her wearing thick gray socks and has the sudden revelation that she is a human being and is shocked by “her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him.” Is this the first time Russ has realized or acknowledged that the people outside of him have their own feelings? Many sources say children reach that point by the age of two.

Russ has a terrible high and is forced to finally acknowledge that Frances is an adult woman: “No boy looked like Frances.” Thank you, Russ. This was a big day for him in terms of being even slightly realistic.

When Frances comes to his office to tell him that she’s quitting the Tuesday circle (unthinkable…how else will Russ EVER BE HAPPY if he can’t spend hours every Tuesday attempting to graze her shoulder), Russ flips out. “All at once, he was seized by a hatred so intense he could have strangled her. She was insensitive and self-adoring, a careless trampler of records, a casual crusher of hearts.” He tells her she’s full of bullshit and asks her to leave, tells her she’s a disappointment and “a mess of phony self-reproach” and that she makes him sick. (Her response? “Wow. Ouch.” Frances is funny!)

And Frances…likes this attitude. “I like your honesty,” she says. Why does every character in this book have a humiliation kink? Russ is, like, rubbing his little hands together because he knows he has her right where he wants her. He’s so obvious that even Ambrose is like, “no, you freak, she can’t be in your group for the Arizona trip.” Oh, and I need to mention right now that Rick Ambrose doesn’t do anything weird for the rest of the book and I’m starting to worry we’ll never see him again. Was he an okay guy all along??

Anyway. Frances comes along on the Arizona trip (heavy sigh) and so does Perry, even though at this point it’s obvious that he’s on something a whole lot stronger than marijuana. Marion, meanwhile, is taking Judson to Los Angeles to visit her uncle, aka going to Los Angeles so she can leave Judson with her uncle while she reconnects with Bradley the car salesman. Because did you know she’s thin now? She is. Russ attributes this to her regimen of cigarettes and punishing walks. As diet methods go it’s problematic, but based on other things I’ve seen on recommended Instagram Reels, I think she could get some serious traction there. Comment “cigarettes” and I’ll DM you a link to my plan!

And then…oh, we get really into Russ’s past. Like, REALLY. Is this the first time we learn that Russ was essentially in a Christian cult, one that believed in shunning people?

Russ’s grandpa after he started drinking and hanging out with a younger woman

This flashback initially gave me a lot of sympathy for Russ—he went through it when he was younger. He believed in love and God and truly wanted to do what was right. But then that made me even more mad at him because he had all these lofty goals and now his internal monologue is just the name “Frances Cottrell” on repeat. He’s ignoring his children, definitely doing something inappropriate with a member of his church, lying, sneaking around, wearing a stupid coat, and cheating on his nicotine-addicted wife. This isn’t what he wanted for his life—but then again, does anyone in Franzen world really end up where they wanted?

This flashback shows Russ fall in love with the Navajo people and the Arizona landscape, and then he meets Marion. It’s so interesting to see her from Russ’s point of view at a moment in her life where we know she just got out of the hospital after her complete mental breakdown. She’s incredibly religious now and counting her steps in a way that, as much as I hate to diagnose a fictional character, speaks strongly to OCD. A long time ago I said that Catholicism and all its rules really spoke to me as an obsessive person, and it turns out Marion has the same idea. But she’s feeling pretty healthy, and she’s hot and a Democrat and she reads Graham Greene, and Russ can’t resist her even though it means his family stops talking to him. Suddenly they’re married and moving and then they have kids and she becomes a square. But the thing about her that he cannot tolerate, because he’s Russ, is that she had sex with one (1) person before she met him (that he knows of), while he’s only had sex with her.

And back in the present, he’s got to get to Frances Cottrell, obviously. Well, he does. A lot of stuff happens in Arizona on their mission trip but the four most important things are:

-Russ really has to confront his white savior complex that he swears he doesn’t have but also kind of has, although he exhibits a rare moment of self-awareness when he says, about their mission trip, “we’re mainly here for ourselves.”

-More pee, ugh. “Watching the wood go dark with his urine, he thought of the bare ground going dark with hers, her pants around her ankles. In the sun and the thin air, he felt dizzy.” Russ.

-Russ finally has extremely terrible, unsatisfying sex with Frances Cottrell in an abandoned house with no windows. Yikes.

-Russ finds out that while he was out with Frances Cottrell, Perry overdosed on cocaine.

There is a section from Perry’s coke-addled POV but it’s too difficult to summarize. I have so much empathy for anyone with an addiction, and so much empathy for anyone with mental illness. And also I’m so mad at Perry, who spends his $3,000 from Becky and Clem’s $3,000 (oh yeah, Becky gave her inheritance from her aunt Shirley to her brothers! A bad choice, it turns out!) on cocaine and then gets swindled when trying to buy peyote and whew, it’s a lot!

But wouldn’t you know it, Perry’s troubles bring Marion and and Russ back together because these two freaks are addicted to tragedy. After Marion’s unsatisfying trip to see Bradley, who’s now old and into gardening, she’s recommitted herself to God. She decides to make things work with Russ for reasons I only sort of understand—I wish there was some way she could remain more herself (obsessed, mean, snarky) while still being with Russ, but maybe she kind of is? Their sex life is back on track, and maybe that should be enough.

Becky can’t go away to college because she has to give up the rest of her inheritance for Perry’s treatments/legal bills and also because he burned down a shed on Navajo property (classic Perry), so she goes to Europe with Tanner and gets pregnant and married, in that order. Clem doesn’t get to serve in Vietnam so he goes to Peru to do hard labor (classic Clem).

Marion sends him a letter, sounding like a Stepford wife, all about how great everyone is doing and how they’re moving to another church in Indiana! And then he writes to Becky and she responds like, “They’re leaving because everyone at the church knows he had an affair with Frances Cottrell, you idiot.”

Honestly, the whole thing with Frances Cottrell reminded me of how Jonathan Safron Foer left his wife to be with Natalie Portman without confirming that she actually wanted to be with him¹. (Here’s a short version of the story.) Russ really spent all this time daydreaming about how he was going to be with Frances for the rest of his life, totally unconcerned with her actual feelings. And then nothing happened anyway! And now he has new reasons to make himself feel guilty for the rest of his life.

The story ends with Clem realizing how much he loves his sister, coming home, and surprising her at the park where she’s hanging out with her baby. He still feels the inextricable pull to her, but she seems like she could take or leave him. She’s estranged from the rest of their family but Clem is still obsessed with getting her to love him in a way that I don’t understand. And that’s the end of the book.

Cut to me frantically Googling “next Jonathan Franzen book when???”

I didn’t see most of these endings coming—I didn’t think Perry would end the book quite so bleakly, I didn’t think Clem would be even more annoying that he was at the beginning, I never dreamed Becky was going to marry Tanner, and I did think Russ and Marion would come back together but I didn’t know how. Judson, though…I know this sounds out there, but do you think Judson Saltburned everyone? You know, kinda ruined their lives so he could finally have the quiet home he always wanted? He probably threw out the spermicide gel that came with Becky’s diaphragm. Now he can play his board games in peace.

I don’t even know what to do with myself now that the book is over.

I’m not here yet.

Until the next book, there are a few related books (and movies, and podcasts) you can check out. Consider it a Franzen Flight.

-The Ice Storm (film). I hated this movie but it does feel very Franzen-esque. It’s set in the 1970s and deals with dysfunctional families and weird sex.

-Rabbit, Run (book). I haven’t read this in maybe fifteen years, but it’s another story of bad decisions from one shameful dude as a way of looking at American culture as a whole. I feel like there’s so much of John Updike and Philip Roth in Franzen, but here’s one of Franzen’s characteristic rants against both of them!

-Middlemarch (book). The one that started it all! I probably won’t read this until spring (when, God willing, we’ll have news about when the next book is coming!) but I’m so curious why/how Crossroads relates.

-Mr. Difficult (podcast). My editor Laurie told me about this Franzen-themed podcast. I’ve only just started to listen to the Crossroads episodes (boy do they hate Judson) but I’m looking forward to hearing more. I don’t know if I remember enough about his books to listen to the other episodes, but they cover basically everything he’s written.

I’m not sure if it’s clear, given that I was making fun of it most of the time, but I loved this book. My favorite way to discuss something deeply serious is in a deeply unserious manner. I think Crossroads makes a strong argument for Franzen as the author of the Great American Novel (if not this book, surely one to come), but what is the Great American Novel, and does it have to be more accessible than this? It’s not that Crossroads is difficult to read, but it’s not easy. Something I think about a lot as a writer, reader, and reviewer is that so many people do not read, at all, and we’re facing an uphill battle to ever get our books read. Why, then, must we do things that make it so difficult to sustain the average reader’s interest, like frequently switching points of view and going on long tangents into the past? The answer here, of course, is that this isn’t commercial fiction. This is literary fiction. Franzen isn’t concerned with people who would give up just because he’s going to give you pages of a drug-addled rant (Perry).

In that way, and in so many others, Franzen is old-fashioned. He’s hopelessly himself at all times, and I wouldn’t want him to be anything else.

Please do let me know your thoughts on Crossroads, and Franzen, and anything else. I will not be reading any more Franzen at the moment because, frankly, I need a break. I’m gonna read a thriller for Halloween. I’m also going to not post twice a week for awhile, because unlike Russ, I do have some self-awareness and I can realize that I’m actually avoiding my own book, because I’m scared. Perhaps giving myself a homework assignment no one asked for and then writing the equivalent of thirty pages about Crossroads was a weird use of my time.

But then again, I was going to spend this much time thinking about it anyway, so I might as well write it down! Thank you if you followed along on this strange project. I’ll see you next week. Franzen forever. xo

1. Further proof that being hot (and vegan!) is a curse.