He didn’t write it for his mother, who he says “became a full, amazing person in the last years of her life,” exactly, but he’s taken a significant departure with it-keeping an eye on the sort of story she might have enjoyed by taking a kinder tack toward his characters. Its protagonists could not be less glamorous, its intrigues less international. The novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, who reviewed Crossroads for us, is on the. His upcoming novel, Crossroads, is meant to be different. Crossroads is a rejection of Purity ’s empty expansiveness on almost every front. A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, has generated a lot of discussion, as his work tends to do. The anger he’s long harbored, manifested in everything from his self-admitted road rage to his vocal hatred of social media, informed his five previous novels, from his 1988 debut, The Twenty-Seventh City, to 2015’s Purity, he says. A homemaker who died of cancer in 1999, his mother, Irene, continues to be influential in the author’s life.

It better contain the author’s hallmarks, but.

“You must have observed the person carefully and you must have identified what’s likely to hurt the most, and then there’s the rhetorical challenge of delivering the painful blow without having your fingerprints on it,” he says. Crossroads A- Author Jonathan Franzen Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux To rise above such noise, the book better be big and it better be good. “It requires a high level of subtlety,” says the 62-year-old novelist from his home in Santa Cruz, California. The first half of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, centers on an improbable church youth group in the near western suburbs of Chicago during the final days of 1971.

Jonathan Franzen’s mother knew how to wound him in just the right way.

Crossroads franzen review