“I know I’m a bad person,” insists her mother, Marion, a converted-then-lapsed Catholic who suffers from depression. “She herself was good,” Franzen writes in close third-person of 18-year-old Becky, the morning after her first kiss (with another girl’s boyfriend). So much for his resolution.įarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 592 pp., $30.00Ĭrossroads is a novel about how to be a good person. They discuss the possibility of redemption, the danger of constantly second-guessing one’s motives, and Perry’s fear that he is already “damned.” Their conversation is abruptly brought to a halt when the minister’s wife notices that Perry is drunk, prompting the boy to insult her before breaking down in tears. If he takes satisfaction in being a good brother, is he really being good, or is he merely being a narcissist? The men are pleased by the complexity and sincerity of his inquiry Perry is pleased by their pleasure. Roughly halfway through Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel, 15-year-old Perry Hildebrandt, pleasantly buzzed on gløgg at a local minister’s holiday party, confronts two men of faith with a difficult question: Is it possible to be truly good? Perry, an unusually intelligent teenager, has himself recently resolved to stop selling and consuming drugs and to be nicer to his older sister, Becky, but he worries that his efforts are ultimately self-serving.
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