I finished this book today. It was published last month and I was able to download the e-book from the library last week. There are a lot of people waiting for the book so I read in quickly in a little over a week.
It was very well written novel about a very dysfunctional religious family from the Chicago suburbs in the early 1970's. The father is a minister with a Mennonite family background married to a woman with a history of mental problems and four children. The oldest is about a week younger than me and there were some interesting aspects to his life that I could relate to such as dealing with the draft, the military and the Vietnam War. But of course he was from a well to do suburban family where the young people routinely had student deferments from the draft whereas I came from an urban working class neighborhood where most of the kids my age and older were heading to the military.
Franzen was very good with some amazingly described characters but I was somewhat disappointed in the excessively goddie storyline throughout the novel. It seemed like most of the main characters wanted to stop everything and pray whenever whenever something went wrong. I guess there really are people like that but I just don't want to read about them.
The crossroads in the title was not just referring to the challenges of the characters' moral crises in their lives but also was the name of a Christian youth group social organization that triggers a lot of the action in the novel. The author does have a gift in blending all of those moral crises into a challenging social mix of family, marriage parenthood, religion, sibling individualism, drugs, adultery, coming-of-age, sex, music, church groups, etc.
While reading this book I was thinking a lot about my life around that time in the early 1970's and also the several years before. I had my own experience of turning away from organized religion and Christianity in general. My experience was so different than most of the kids in the book where they were embracing faith at a time when I found it to be useless and stayed that way for the next fifty years.
This is the first book in a trilogy and I'm sure I will also read the next two books.
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