Wondering whether to resume reading Jonathan Franzen’s _Crossroads_

 I WAS READING this in the summer of 2022; I got to p. 242 and just ran out of gas.

The novel is set in a Midwestern suburb at the early end of the 1970s, and “Crossroads” is the name of a church youth group that looms large in the lives of the novel’s main characters. Russ Hildebrandt is a senior pastor at the church (unspecified mainline Protestant) where the Crossroads group meets, but he has been excluded from its activities for being too perceptibly covetous of an assistant pastor’s standing as guru of the group. One of his sons, Clem, belonged to the group but is now in college; sister Becky and brother Perry are current members. Then there is Mom, Marion, and another son, still in grade school.

I stopped reading because each of the Hildebrandts is profoundly unappealing. I know that is wrong of me, having spent much of my career trying to cajole students out of “hating” a book because they find its characters unsympathetic. The Hildebrandts are not anguished like Raskolnikov, though, or perverse but articulate like Valmont or Humbert Humbert, or scrappy and unscrupulous like Becky Sharp. They are just selfish and obtuse in humdrum ways.

Reverend Russ is trying to start an affair with a divorced congregant. Chip off the old block Becky is trying to undermine Crossroads’ most charismatic male’s relationship with his girlfriend. Perry sells pot to middle schoolers. Meanwhile, other Hildebrandts have consciences that are, if anything, overactive. Marion is tying herself in knots over an episode of promiscuity that happened before her marriage to Russ. Clem has decided his student exemption from the draft is unwarranted class privilege, so he has dropped out and promptly informed his draft board.

So, once again, Franzen is interested in knotty ethics questions (see Purity and Freedom) and middle class American families that are a good deal more messed-up than appearances suggest (see all his other novels).

But, thanks to Kevin Kruse, I now wonder whether Franzen is exploring one of the more interesting cultural questions of US history in the second half of the 20th century: that is, how did mainline Protestantism collapse? For most of American history, it defined the mainstream of American spiritual life, and in the mid-1950s seemed more dominant than ever. Now, it seems defined by big empty downtown churches with aging congregations while the evangelicals are power brokers in the Republican party. 

The early 1970s might just be a crucial breaking point, and the Hildebrandts might be an insight into why things broke the way they did. I’m just about persuadedI should pick it up again.