I’m grumpy about this novel, said to be the first of a trilogy. I did not want at any point in the first 500 pages (of 580) to finish Crossroads, but my hope for its redemption (I had admired though not loved Corrections) and the fame of its author … well, I kept on to the end. And I’d read already a sentence Kathryn Schulz had written about Crossroads for her review in The New Yorker (October 4, 2021). “‘Crossroads’ is an imperfect novel that is nonetheless a great one.” Well, once finished with the book, if I’m OK with her word “imperfect,” but disappointed with its timidity, you may guess, and you’d be right, that I’m hardly OK with “great.” I’m dismayed. Schulz looks forward to the two novels that are to follow on Crossroads; for my part, I’m so put out, I cannot yet imagine I’ll read them.

The weightiest matter in the gap between Schulz and me may be located in another one (or two) of her opinions. “Franzen is not Dickens, which I mean here as a compliment; he does not do moral pageantry, doling out impossible quantities of virtue to some characters while withholding it entirely from others. Instead, in ‘Crossroads,’ the desire to be good is broadly shared but alarmingly ephemeral.” This sentence is offensive. To characterize the vibrant characters of Dickens, some of whom are lovable, others not at all, and some in between, as simply figures within a “moral pageant” is a miscarriage of judgement that for a moment leaves me breathless. To even compare Franzen to Dickens has, for me, nearly the same result. Yes, Dickens has an emphatic social concern, that of an obscene degree of wealth-inequality within the populace of Victorian England and the terrible toll that injustice imposes thereby on humanity at large. He may put literature, the novel in his case, to use as the vehicle for his concern, because he has grasped its bedrock requirement and has the will and genius for meeting it: create characters who come alive. In Crossroads, Franzen, with the exceptions of some of the minor roles, fails this requirement. His principal characters are wooden; one feels their author pulling the strings. Which is why the book was so hard for me to read; I didn’t care about them. To be fair, the book is about a grievously unhappy family, every member of which save one (the youngest) has a personality disorder—though each bears some dose of psychopathy, the main feature is borderline in the case of the mother, narcissistic in the case of the father, and a varied mix of the two for three of the four children. The central fault at stake in a personality disorder, by definition, is maturational arrest of selfhood; so, yes, the personality of the sufferer is “stuck” in more stereotypy, less grownup autonomy—thus its recognizability. Fictional versions of such persons will bear the stamp of their identity’s confinement and instability, but when successfully invented they do come alive. Think of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, not even to speak of the many vivid psychopaths in literature.

May we speculate about what has gotten in Franzen’s way? Maybe too much philosophy. Schulz thinks Franzen has made his central mission an exploration of goodness, this dimension in particular: doesn’t goodness always signify on behalf of its exemplar the wish for some sort of profit, even if that profit goes toward pride alone? If she’s right, his philosophical purpose may have derailed a more literary one. (Think of Hamlet’s famous comment to Horatio about philosophy in Act I, Scene 5.) The who-ness, relatively speaking, bestowed on the minor characters by comparison with the principals would be explained: Franzen needed them for a narrative purpose, not a philosophical one, so his native literary talent was freed up to do its thing in their creation.

Schulz bases her supposition about Franzen’s concerns on one of the disordered family’s members especially, the next to youngest, Perry, who literally states it aloud within a party of grownups to which he has invited himself. My own suppositions go broader. I think Franzen wonders and worries about the welfare of the modern family, finding within it mysteries as profound as the inescapable enigma of individual selfhood. And I think that concern gives birth to another, one even larger and more general, which is that of authority of viewpoint—religious, just to take one possible and traditional location for it. Does any viewpoint at all about life and how it’s led deserve a place of privilege? And if not, how to understand (and survive) the existential and moral chaos that would seem to be the consequence of such a conclusion reaching wide consensus. And I take his concerns, if I’m right about them, seriously; they are worthy indeed. But if literature of his creation is to be their carriage, it must be powered by believable, large-as-life characters, with whom we readers may identify, some positively, some negatively, and some ambiguously. They cannot be puppets.