March 5, 2022
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
The Hildebrandt family is a fucked-up mess. The father is the assistant paster at one of those mega-churches, tired of his wife Marion, ogling one of the parishioners, and feuding with the youth pastor. The wife has a dark secret of her own (maybe more than one). They have four kids: the oldest is obsessed with sex and wants to quit college and enlist in the army and go to Vietnam; the daughter is in the middle of first love; the second son is 10 years old, brainy, drinks gin and sells 'Ludes at school; and the youngest, Judson, who is the only one with any redeeming qualities so of course, he's practically ignored for the whole book.
Annoying, unlikeable, uninteresting characters, focused on petty shit. This is supposed to be the first of a trilogy, but in my opinion, he doesn't need to write anything more about these people. Way WAY too long. Needed a good editor. Took too long to set up any kind of story (because there really isn't a plot). As much as I loved Franzen's first book, The Corrections, all of his books after that first one have been kind of boring.
A mega-church
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