![]() ![]() Fittingly, the book opens with Russ Hildebrandt, associate pastor at First Reformed Church, pursuing and luxuriating in a prospective act of adultery with widowed parishioner Frances Cottrell. ![]() To make things only as simple as they are and no simpler, it also shows the reader goodness is often an accidental consequence of human actions rather than a product of their considered and concerted efforts. ![]() The key handed the reader in this secular theodicy set in a religious Midwestern suburb might be the insight that no one can be good to everyone all the time, but everyone can be good to someone some of the time. Instead in adopting an expansive gesture only available to someone not a casualty of terminal irony poisoning, Crossroads: A Key to All Mythologies shows that it is hard but possible to know, do, and be good. Unlike a straightforward postmodern novel the book doesn’t purport to show that the moral performances of the characters are irremediably nugatory. They are also all, excluding Judson the nine year old, grappling with the tension between their desire to be good and their recurrent failure to measure up to that axiological standard. In Franzen’s first novel in seven years they all belong to the Hildebrandt family unit. What do an uncool pastor, a failed actress, a wunderkind with a 160 IQ and drug addiction, a popular girl, and a toddler have in common? Not their common humanity, though that is true enough as far as platitudes go. ![]()
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