In a later interview, Franzen felt obliged to admit that his first two novels, with their DeLilloesque state-of-the-nation commentaries, had failed; in part, because they were premised on the author being smarter than everyone else. What his post-Corrections career has indicated – between the Schrödinger’s cat of Oprah approval and the angst of Jodi Picoult – is that Franzen has always struggled to accept his audience. He may no longer see himself as the smartest person in the room, but that is because he remains unsure about which room he is actually in. Thus Franzen has always been at an artistic crossroads; a joke given tremulous encouragement by this novel’s cover design, which places the title directly beneath ‘Jonathan’ and before ‘Franzen’, each almost equally prominent, encouraging quips about ‘the latest from Jonathan Crossroads’, unpromisingly titled Franzen: A Key to All Mythologies.

Still, if every John Updike novel was about John Updike, as Wallace opined, every Franzen novel mythologises the point at which the individual’s mask slips. Franzen, whose writing has always been attuned to the rhythms of consciousness, conveys that of his characters via his facility for third-person limited narration and free indirect discourse. In Crossroads, the consciousness of the Hildebrant family is ruptured by the shifting social mores of the 1970s, post-Manson and Altamont, pre-London Calling, the OPEC oil crisis, and Randy Newman signalling the advent of the yuppies in earnest with ‘It’s Money That I Love’. Although the proceedings take time to unfold – this is Franzen, remember – their calibration is tight.

Susan Sontag, in ‘The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer’, wrote that ‘For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain’. According to this barometer, the Hildebrandts are a deeply spiritual family; hangdog reproaches and guilt-wracked escape fantasies comprise the novel’s raw material. Like another Midwestern author, Thornton Wilder, Franzen delights in moral conundrums and the personal conflicts they can generate. His characters don’t have relationships so much as psychic tribulations. Although he enjoys watching them squirm, Franzen dedicates attention to their inner lives and sustaining idiosyncrasies. Each is forensically examined and dissected, creating a tension that propels them toward their psychological limits.

We begin with Russ, associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, whose eye has begun to wander from his long-suffering wife, Marion, toward Frances Cottrell, a widowed parishioner. Russ, a study in male vanity, oscillates between the twin poles of self-regard and self-pity. He is cruelly sentimental – and callous – toward his wife, ‘who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry’. This is the purest manifestation of his narcissism: note the heavy lifting ‘thrilled’ performs here; how it conveys Russ’s confinement, the prison from which he can only recognise other people’s appraisal of him.

Russ is not the novel’s only exemplary sufferer: calculation and self-pity are forces the Hildebrandts can all claim some knowledge of. Their daughter, Becky, is enamoured of Tanner, musician boyfriend of another girl. Hoping to be nearer to him, she begins attending Crossroads, the church’s ‘right-on’ youth group (Franzen himself attended a similar one in the 1970s). Belief, for Becky, provides the opportunity for ‘unforeseen advantage’, but the lines between love of another and love of self remain ambiguous: during a religious epiphany, feeling that she has ‘glimpsed the light of God’, Becky accepts Christ. The affirmation, however, sees her judiciously placing some emphasis on the ‘for her’ part of the idea that ‘Christ had died for her sins’: ‘She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward.’

For drug-dealing younger sibling Perry, ‘used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others’, pride is a source of incalculable loneliness. Aspects of Perry’s character recall Wallace, who described the ‘conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance’ as ‘the single great informing conflict of the American psyche’. Indulging in abstract games and manipulations, Perry becomes oddly rudderless, his life ready to be shrugged off. Here he is, having admitted dealing drugs to his mother:

Although the confession had been strategic, a matter of securing her complicity against the raging of his father, should his misconduct ever come to general light, he’d been prepared to shed some tears, as he’d done with impressive success at Crossroads, in order to be forgiven. But his mother hadn’t seemed to care.

Performing for others, seeking approval (after securing a place on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ ‘was tempted to call [Frances] immediately and report his accomplishment’): this is the ‘imp of perversity’ each character shares, the ‘sarcastically dissenting alter ego’. For the children, a willingness to let their masks slip, whether in the form of parental discoveries or confessionals, is threaded throughout these calculations; everything they do, to paraphrase W.S. Merwin, is stitched with its colour.

Perhaps the book’s most fascinating example of mask-slippage is Marion, whose personality is a veritable cocktail of disdain and self-disgust. Harbouring a confused but steadfast desire to find independence, she channels her scorn into vanity or bad faith: ‘She truly was a bad person, because along with love and remorse, no less strongly, she was feeling self-pity for having been wrenched from the vividness of memory and fantasy; resentment for the interruption of her disturbance.’ In Crossroads, the recipients of disturbance variously either begrudge the intrusion or welcome it. Becky, for example, is happy to indulge in her born-again moment.

This is how hypocrisy reveals itself in the characters; a feeling curiously attuned to the disingenuity of the present, where feelings are viewed less as experiences than naïve attachments, always conspiring to inform against us and reveal our vulnerability: when Katy Perry sang ‘Don’t be afraid to catch feels’, the emphasis was always more on the word ‘afraid’ than the negative modifier.

In Crossroads, meanwhile, God’s commandments – His negative modifiers – provide opportunities for the characters’ shared evangelism. Franzen reminds us that kindness can double as competitive achievement, as when Marion, upon giving fruit to her father, recalls ‘the satisfaction of being a better daughter than her sister’. When Russ gets stoned with Frances, his drug-abetted acquisition of a newfound power and charisma is equated, not only with Ambrose, head of Crossroads and former friend turned nemesis, but with God himself. As he tells Ambrose earlier in the novel:

All I can see is you having it both ways. Getting off on your power and feeling good about the fact that it worries you. Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your ‘honesty’ about it. And maybe everyone does that. Maybe everyone finds a way to feel good about their fundamental sinfulness, but it doesn’t make me hate you any less.

The irony is that Russ is vain even about what God thinks of him, and grappling with a family that hates him for it. God has not forsaken anyone in this book, even if magnanimity often threatens to.

In Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006), a chapter on Charles Schulz gave Franzen an opportunity to meditate on how we might learn to love others ‘as we love ourselves’. The idea is reprised here: following a cataclysmic family event, we learn that Russ, unaware of his eldest son Clem’s dislike of him, holds a deep affection for Clem:

He’d been living in a world consisting of Frances, God, Rick Ambrose, and the negative blot of Marion. Of his children, the only one he felt at all connected to was Clem, and it grieved him that Clem was with his girlfriend for the holiday; it deprived him of a chance to atone for embarrassing him.

What’s telling here is the self-absorbed inflection of that ‘it deprived him’. The view of human nature in Crossroads is a lonely one, each person trapped inside themselves, alone behind the bars. They struggle towards revelation, hoping for some solace that will yield more than vanity projects and superiority pursuits. By the time we reach the story of Russ and Marion’s first meeting, late in the novel, the effect of the delay creates a delicate pathos:

He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him – it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people.

He feels compassion for himself, a man who ‘[suffered] and needed his care’. And he weeps for himself, too – alive and unredeemed, squirming atop the Cross.