If “the corrections” now feels dated, this is mainly because of the precision with which Franzen has assembled his mosaic of a world at the Twin Towers, pasting all his floppy disks and cell phones to antennae. In “Crossroads,” without overdoing it, he nicely textured the confusing final years of the Aquarian Age. The Tanner strumming the guitar is “mellow”; people still joke that “this gang will self-destruct in five seconds”; and Becky thinks that “the lumpy, shady snow covering her window was like the cellulite pictured in her mother’s red books.”
Franzen’s lyricism has always taken scientific and technical mock turns: blood is not given in his books; you are “phlebotomized”; an old photograph commemorates the Lambert’s sofa “in its pre-upholstered instantiation”. The virtuosity calmed down in “Crossroads”, often for the better but sometimes to the point of slackening: “He thought his head was going to burst with terror”; “It was perhaps the most extraordinary moment of his life.” Although in “Purity” he made fun of his own “false specificity”, Franzen may still prefer inventory to description: The First Reformed Church contains “a jumble of wooden sheep and a fake ox, graying with dust.
The gender in his novels ranges from rhapsodic to macabre, but the descriptions of the latter are almost uniformly and terribly perplexing. We’re told that a male character in “Purity” “honestly seemed to want his private thing” and in “Crossroads” that Russ’s “testosterone” showed up in his long underpants. There is worse than that book after book, enough to keep a reader hoping the characters loosen up and just talk. The author’s dialogue, especially in the argumentation, remains fast and nimble, elevated a little beyond credibility in the manner of a good script.
Franzen’s novels beg the question of whether the characters can be surrealized, so round that they begin to lose edge. Nothing ever goes unnoticed by the narrative voice, whatever the point of view from which it comes; the author’s abundant imagination always prefers to add rather than select. Readers of literary fiction are used to poorly conceived novels being presented as “linked stories”. Franzen’s books are more like linked novels. Their interlocking, expansive and heavy parts make them move spasmodically, with long background sequences interrupting and then having to catch up with the material in the foreground. As he did with Walter Berglund in “Freedom”, Franzen delves into Russ’s childhood only after 400 pages of “Crossroads” have passed. In fact, in these family chronicles, each generation may seem to be the father of the one that came before it and not the one that followed it. And yet, we would not want to impose another method on the author; the books coming from his particular sensibility could not possibly be fulfilled otherwise. Like Marion, they need to step back in order to move forward.
Franzen concluded his “Why bother? »Essay by declaring allegiance to« tragic realism », a natural mixture of social and private. As much as any writer of his generation (albeit at times infuriatingly), he achieved it. A reader, however, never loses the feeling that Franzen would always like to seek something more, to be a novelist whose books tell not only how we to do exist but also how we should. “How to live?” – Walter Berglund’s question for himself – is perhaps the one Franzen would really like to answer for the characters who inhabit his pages and the world. The characters in his books, including “Crossroads”, consistently fail in their efforts to do well, which are motivated by a need for redemption or simply for personal fulfillment; the civic goal is thwarted by personal coercion.
And yet, what Russ seems to be asking towards the end of “Crossroads” – “Did the words express emotion, or did they actively create it?” – comes closer to a prescriptive inclination that the morally serious Franzen may even now aspire to pursue. “Crossroads”, we are told, is the first book in a trilogy, and if the Hildebrandts move forward in time, they will take their author with them back to the here and now, where fiction retains its slim and diminishing chance of success. ‘influence the life it reflects.
