Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless-unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. “This included The Lord of the Rings and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.” Readers will get a glimpse of Franzen’s first foray into multi-volume storytelling on Octothat’s when Crossroads is set for release.Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads. “Everything I loved as a young person I read three or four times,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. The description also offers a sense of what to expect from the trilogy as a whole: “By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. “įranzen has spoken about his own fondness for trilogies as a reader. Temple has written a longer breakdown of the announcement on Literary Hub, including the information that the trilogy’s title might be an homage to George Eliot’s Middlemarch.įranzen’s publisher has provided some information on the book, including the fact that Crossroads follows a Chicago-area family dealing with crises personal and societal in 1971.

2oyi3iiqZF - Emily Temple November 12, 2020 Maybe he IS the leading novelist of his generation.

Looks like Jonathan Franzen has finally completed Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies, letting Dodo off the hook.

Franzen trilogy