Crossroads

“Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.”

While Russ and Marion do not realize it, they share the tendency to take comfort in feelings of guilt. Russ feels closest to God when he most needs God’s forgiveness. While there may not be anything inherently wrong with this tendency, the novel shows that Russ often uses it as a way to soothe his conscience when he has knowingly hurt someone. He may have done something wrong, he thinks, but at least now he feels closer to God. 

“If only it were possible to argue with his father without flushing and choking up with tears of anger and hating himself for being smarter, but also less good, than the old man!”

Clem, Becky, and Perry are all disillusioned with Russ for different reasons. Clem considers him a moral hypocrite. Becky considers him an awkward, uncool presence who confides in her things that would better be said to a friend or therapist than a child. Perry thinks Russ is not particularly intelligent, but Perry is the only one of the three who still considers his father a better person than himself. Perry considers most people morally superior to himself. A complicated character, he realizes he is smarter than most people he knows while suffering from very low self-esteem.

“The fundamental economy of Crossroads: public displays of emotion purchased overwhelming approval […] By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them. Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you (conspicuously) introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth.”

In this passage from Perry’s point of view, Franzen aptly describes the teenage impulse to conform to peer behavior while imagining that the conformity is an organic expression of unique identity. Perry is probably the only teen in Crossroads who consciously thinks of the group as a contest for social capital, but that does not mean others are not subconsciously motivated by the same impulse. Becky, interestingly, does the reverse: She throws away some of her social capital by joining Crossroads and finds relationships there that feel more authentic that her school relationships predicated on popularity alone.

“Perry could see that he’d hurt his friend’s feelings; that they’d reached a crossroads. Are you willing to leave passive complicity behind you? The voice of Rick Ambrose in his head. Do you have the guts to risk the active witnessing of a real relationship?”

This passage that contains the novel’s title is a perfect example of the half-winking, half-serious tone that Franzen takes toward Crossroads throughout the novel. On one hand, Rick Ambrose’s challenges to the teens to strive for ever greater empathy, honesty, and connectedness seem corny and almost embarrassingly sincere. Rick pushes for these things with no hint of irony or equivocation; many of his admonitions to the teens sound like the kind of thing one would read if Jesus wrote a therapist’s workbook. Yet the Hildebrandts really do suffer from failing to “risk the active witnessing of a real relationship.” They fail to communicate or mis-communicate constantly, drifting further away from one another

“Inclusiveness […] was not only gracious but no less valuable than exclusivity was in building popularity—witness the results of the cheerleading election the following year. To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck, in her mind, a happy balance between the two very different people whose example mattered to her.”

Becky considers Perry to be a somewhat awkward, unfriendly, and arrogant person, but in many ways the two are more alike than they realize. Just like Perry, Becky recognizes and enjoys when her own kindness accrues to her benefit; she practices kindness partly for its own sake but partly to advance her popularity. The difference is that Perry is bothered by this double-sidedness in himself and wonders how he can change it, while Becky accepts it as a fact of life. 

“This group started as a Christian fellowship, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’m a little worried about what we’ve unleashed. What I’ve unleashed. I’m worried that, if it doesn’t end up leading us back to God, it’s just an intense kind of psychological experiment. Which could just as easily end up hurting people as liberating them.”

Rick Ambrose’s concern about Crossroads’ effect is not without justification: For the leader of a nominally Christian group, Rick spends very little time discussing any specific teachings or doctrines of Christianity. Many of his exercises would be just as relevant to a secular self-help seminar as a Christian fellowship group. This style is indicative of the way in which American Christianity used to be much less heavily connected to one particular movement: evangelicalism. While evangelicalism has now become tied to American political conservatism and therefore one of the most prevalent movements of Christianity in the news, this was not always the case. In the 1970s, groups like Rick’s, with a liberal, social justice-oriented bent and a de-emphasis on literal interpretation of the Bible, were more common. Practitioners of Christianity similar to Rick’s still exist today, but they are less identified with more culturally recognizable forms of Christianity.

“In the waning days of the semester, as the reality of his academic failures had sunk in, the most salient attraction of forfeiting his deferment had been to avoid going to France with his girlfriend and sister.”

Clem and Becky have a particularly close sibling relationship. Toward the end of the novel, Becky even comments that she sometimes wonders if it is weirdly, unnaturally close. Similarly, when Clem is honest with himself, he knows the real reason he would not want to go to Europe with his sister and girlfriend is because he would rather be there with just his sister. While Franzen drops a couple of hints like this that the level of attachment is unusual, the reader never sees anything that is cause for alarm. Rather, Clem seems to think of himself as part brother and part father figure to Becky, wanting to be in league against their parents with her but also dispensing approval or disapproval of her romantic choices. Much like a father, he eventually has to learn to release this tight grip, and to share her with the loved ones she chooses for herself. 

“Other strong choices were available. […] The particular choice he’d made was aimed squarely at his father.”

Clem’s entire storyline would probably not have happened if Russ had not been ousted from Crossroads. Even as a teenager, Clem is in some ways more mature than his father; Russ cares about having the popular kids’ approval, while Clem looks at his popular peers with blithe disinterest in social rankings. When the Crossroads debacle that leads to Russ’s departure reveals this gulf in maturity, Clem loses all respect for his father. However, his father has always been a massively influential figure in his life, so he has to communicate his disappointment in some way, and does so by rejecting Russ’s pacifism and putting himself in danger.

“Guilt at First Reformed wasn’t all that different from guilt at the Ethical Culture Society. It was a version of liberal guilt, an emotion that inspired people to help the less fortunate. For a Catholic, guilt was more than just a feeling. It was the inescapable consequence of sin. It was an objective thing, plainly visible to God.”

Marion clings to Catholicism as a way of reassuring herself that she really is as bad of a person as she thinks. Her therapist tries to explain to her that she was a victim of trauma and abuse, but Marion does not want to hear this. In her worldview, she and the rest of humanity are inherently evil. She carries with her a sense that if only she could be punished for her sins, perhaps she might be able to finally move on from them. This is why Marion is more relieved than broken when Perry’s arrest and suicide attempt occurs late in the novel; the long-awaited punishment has finally come. 

“She couldn’t get away from red. It was the color of his house. It was how he signaled that wherever she turned he was already there. Red bows, red ribbons. Red-striped candy canes. Shiny stars and crescent moons of metallic red cardboard. The red house. The red car. The red in the sink at her old rooming house. The red wagon. The red wagon. The red wagon. Evil had pursued her all her life, and now the world was exploding with the color of it, and nowhere was there refuge.”

One reason Marion develops religious faith is that the elderly man who rapes her in exchange for procuring her an illegal abortion reminds her of the devil. In appearance, he looks like Santa, yet he leaves an indelible impression of evil slyness, luring her into his home with comforting words only to offer her a perverse bargain. The associations she makes between him and the color red match both Santa’s and Satan’s cultural depictions. He has a red house, and Los Angeles is filled with red Christmas decorations when she meets him. For the rest of her life, she believes this man to have been Satan incarnate, and their encounter never stops haunting her.

“For twenty-five years, she’d believed that her life with Russ was the blessing she’d received from a forgiving God, a blessing she’d earned by her years of Catholic prayer and penance, a life she continued to earn daily by suppressing the badness in her and keeping her mouth shut.”

For much of Marion and Russ’s relationship, Marion fails to see Russ’s faults because she is too fixated on her own. When in their dating years he gets sulky and resentful at her admission that she was not a virgin when they met, she internalizes this as her own failure rather than his. She already felt guilt over her sexual history, much of which involved rape or coercion. Throughout the novel, she finally opens her eyes to Russ’s immature, cruel, and selfish tendencies.

“The biggest barrier to Becky’s relationship with Perry had been her feeling that he disdained her for her lesser intelligence. Maybe all she’d needed was some sign that he respected her and was interested in her as a person. Now that he’d given her such a sign, maybe they really could be friends. Maybe her whole family could be happier, beginning with the unlikely duo of her and Perry. […] For better and for worse, but mostly for better, Crossroads was making her more alive.”

When Perry approaches Becky with friendship, he wonders if his action counts as “good.” He recognizes that his motivation partially lies in the likelihood that Becky will not tell their parents about his drug use if he gets on her good side. No matter his motivation, she is heartened and excited at the gesture of friendship. One of the novel’s central questions is whether action can be separated from intention. Although the novel gives no obvious answers, it offers examples of good intentions that bring heartbreak and bad intentions that bring joy.

“In his giddiness, he’d confessed, at least by implication, that Marion no longer turned him on. He’d felt the need to shed Marion, break free of her, in order to be more like Ambrose; and now his vanity stood shamefully revealed. His only thought was to get away, find fresher air, and seek comfort in God’s mercy.”

Despite all his faults, Russ has moments of honest self-reflection. Here, he accurately realizes that he made a mistake in making an inappropriate disclosure to a teen girl, and that he did so due to his jealousy of Rick Ambrose. However, while he longs to seek God’s mercy, he never meaningfully repents and makes amends for this error. Instead, he stubbornly internalizes the incident as Rick and Marion’s fault, with himself cast as the victim. Not until the ending of the book does Russ lower himself to true repentance. 

“‘No matter what I do, it’s always me who’s in the wrong. You’re all saved, but apparently I’m damned. Do you think I enjoy being damned?’ A sob of self-pity escaped him. ‘I’m doing the best I can!’”

Perry’s anguished outburst at the Haefles’ Christmas party exemplifies the problem he faces. People sometimes notice the self-medication he uses to ease his troubled mind, like drugs and alcohol, but they usually overlook the troubled mind itself. Here, Mrs. Haefle scolds him for underage drinking but ignores the fact that he was trying to get answers to serious existential questions from respected faith leaders when she interrupted him. Only Marion glimpses his inner turmoil, recognizing in it her own experiences with mental health conditions.

“Bradley had excited her at levels deeper than Russ ever could or ever would, because only with Bradley had she been her entire, crazy, sinning self.”

One of Marion’s main problems is that she tends to conflate mental health experiences with sin. Her symptoms include extended dissociative states, self-harm during those dissociative states, and difficulty processing everyday stimuli like sights and sounds. Yet when she thinks back to her affair with Bradley, she remembers it as a time when she was particularly sinful. While it is entirely possible to have a mental health condition or disorder and make immoral choices at the same time, Marion dwells on the latter and dismisses the relevance of the former.

“You can march in your marches and brag about it to your all-white congregation. But when it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, you don’t see any problem with me being in college and letting some Black kid fight for me in Vietnam. Or some poor white kid from Appalachia. Or some poor Navajo, like Keith Durochie’s son.”

Through Clem’s storyline, Crossroads explores what it means to be a moral person with consistent principles. On one hand, Russ fails to see that his racial progressivism can be showy and boastful, even as he sometimes fails in his allyship with communities of color. On the other hand, Clem is so attached to abstract principles that he has no leniency for a father caring more about his own son than hypothetical people he will never meet. Both men would do well to move toward each other’s positions, meeting in the reasonable middle ground.

“She really was smarter than he was. As crazy as she was acting, she was right about that, and it didn’t matter if she was squat and red-faced, it didn’t matter if he slew dragons. As long as they stayed married—even if they didn’t—she would always have that on him.”

The fact that Russ essentially forgot his wife was a very intelligent person and suddenly remembered when she gained the courage to defy him is a testament to the enormous structural problems within their marriage. Before they marry, Russ makes clear that he resents the idea of Marion having a past sex life and that her emotional life is not as important as his. Marion takes his unsubtle hints and internalizes that she must focus all her energies on being agreeable and submissive. When Russ does remember her intelligence, he conceptualizes the trait as a contest she has won, rather than as a reason to love her.

“It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins. None was deadlier.”

Fittingly, this passage is Russ’s reflection, as he is the most self-pitying of the Hildebrandts, including his teenage children. But all the family members share the trait to some extent, with the exception of Marion who believes she deserves misfortune. That self-pity is not the only cause of the family’s rifts and tragedies at the end of the novel, but it is a major one, segmenting each family member into a world dominated only by their private concerns.

“Russ didn’t want to believe it—there had to be another side of the story. And yet what did he really know about Keith Durochie? […] What he couldn’t remember, now that he thought about it, under the dust plume from the strip mine, was any particular warmth from Keith’s side—any real curiosity or sentiment.”

An important moment for Russ is when he realizes he may not be the perfect exemplar of white allyship he often thinks he is. Yes, he works with communities of color, and usually—with some notable exceptions—defers to their judgment rather than imposing his own. However, he still uses people of color for his personal enrichment. The realization that Keith may not be his friend brings the possibility that Keith is not as virtuous a community leader as Russ always guessed he was, but it also brings the possibility that for decades Russ has inflicted his friendship on someone who does not actually like him.

“It happened that, very recently, less than a week ago, he solved the puzzle of the world’s persistent talk of God. The solution was that he, Perry, was God.”

There are many reasons that Perry turns to drug addiction in the spring of 1972, but one of them is that being high relieves the burden of his spiritual questions. Sober Perry worries about why he can’t just believe in God like other people and what it means to be a good person, but intoxicated Perry is a god unto himself. Through Perry’s god complex, Franzen accurately depicts a common state of mind among addicts: the idea that their actions are not seriously hurting anyone, as they can easily repair any damage they have caused.

“In four weeks, she’d made nearly four hundred dollars, enough to pay the credit-card bill, cover the cost of a rental car and Disneyland, and buy sundries like the rolls of film that Judson wanted for their trip. Bradley had once said it himself, in a sonnet: she was capable.”

When Bradley wins Marion over the night that they first kiss at the Lerner Motors office, she is most struck that he has described her in a sonnet as “capable.” She has never thought of herself that way, and the idea that someone else has is both flattering and exciting. Virtually on the strength of that word alone, she concedes to starting a romance with Bradley. Although she buries the compliment inside her just like everything else during her marriage to Russ, she never forgets it, and when she starts working again to earn her own money for the Los Angeles trip, she begins to acknowledge it was true all along.

“It was as if they were in league with God Himself, who, knowing everything, knew that beneath her Christian charity was a tough little core of selfishness. Her cheeks burned with hatred of her parents for exposing it.”

Having had an intense emotional experience that brought her to faith, Becky struggles with the reality that she cannot automatically turn off the parts of her she now recognizes as selfish and sinful. The state in which she ends the novel has the potential to polarize readers. Some might think she is still being selfish, shutting out her brother and parents in the midst of their ongoing trials. Others might think she is growing and setting appropriate boundaries with members of the family who took what was rightfully hers. While all of the novel’s characters would love a morality rubric, sometimes selfishness is in the eye of the beholder. 

“Experience had taught him to live with nothing of value except his passport, and so it was with the news of Perry’s collapse and Becky’s disastrous choices, his mother’s sorrows: it was better to travel light.”

Clem is overwhelmed at the news of his family’s misfortunes that arrive in his mother’s letters, choosing to compartmentalize them to get on with his life as a day laborer. The reader might feel the same way; after consuming entire chapters worth of drama in the space of one or two hours, news of the Hildebrandts’ life post-Perry-crisis comes like a deluge in Marion’s letters to Clem. Suddenly, Perry has been in and out of rehab twice, Russ and Marion are moving to Indiana, and Becky has a child. Though at one time Clem may have thought the courageous thing to do was stay in Peru and make sacrifices to live honestly, he has learned and grown since the beginning of the novel. He now recognizes that avoiding possible conflict and difficult conversations at home is not the courageous thing to do; it is the easy way out.