What separates true conviction from mere performance? The gulf between action and intention makes Franzen’s characters skittish about the integrity of their moral character and the strength of their commitments to others. The first book of a three-part “super-novel,” it is preoccupied not only with the difficulty of wanting to be good amid the rising tides of temptation and doubt, but whether being an essentially good person and wanting to be perceived as one are incompatible desires. Like much of Franzen’s fiction, Crossroads (out October 5) is narrated in the third person, in chapters that rotate between family members, each of whom has almost no idea what the others are up to.

Both parents, in turn, are oblivious to their four children, as the eldest three begin to fall into disrepair in various historically appropriate ways. Over the next several hundred pages, naïve and self-deceiving Russ remains insensible to the desires of his wife Marion, who makes plans to reunite with her old flame and rediscover her old, uninhibited self. Now, two days before Christmas 1971, he is nursing his wounded pride by lusting after a parishioner, a sexy widow named Frances. In the first pages of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads, he introduces us to Russ Hildebrandt, a man who soon after berates himself as a “fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown.” Three years earlier, Russ, an associate minister from a strong Mennonite background, was expelled from his church youth group - for his uncoolness, he claims.

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