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Jonathan Franzen

Crossroads: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1 Audio CD – Unabridged, 5 October 2021

by Jonathan Franzen (Author), David Pittu (Reader)

6,604 ratings

Book 1 of 1: A Key to All Mythologies

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Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.

A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.

Language

English
Publisher

MacMillan Audio
Publication date

5 October 2021
Dimensions

13.08 x 5.52 x 14.94 cm
ISBN-10

1250810566
ISBN-13

978-1250810564
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Product description

About the Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

David Pittu is a two-time Tony Award nominee, as well as the award-winning narrator of countless audiobooks, ranging in genre from young adult (Scholastic's 39 Clues series) to spy fiction (Olen Steinhauer's The Last Tourist and Milo Weaver series) to the contemporary fiction of authors such as Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot) and Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) and many more. Pittu received the Audie Award for Best Male Solo Narration for The Goldfinch, which also received the Audie for Best Literary Fiction.

Not only a veteran theater actor, he works regularly in film and television. He lives in New York City.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ MacMillan Audio; Unabridged edition (5 October 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250810566
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250810564
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.08 x 5.52 x 14.94 cm

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About the author

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Jonathan Franzen

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Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels--Purity, Freedom, The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away, How to Be Alone, and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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Gloria sharp

He is a master…

Reviewed in Australia on 7 November 2021

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Wow wow wow . Everything about this book is magnificent. From the story telling, to the ethics, to the imagining. Thank you (again) Jonathan!

One person found this helpful

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Kirsten Jocumsen

Perfection

Reviewed in Australia on 31 January 2022

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Franzen's writing is just so beautiful to read - this story is perfection.

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Amazon Customer

The novel I've been waiting for

Reviewed in Australia on 22 October 2021

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My fourth Franzen novel so far. I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book and it didn't dissapoint. Buying his other books now

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Masterful

Reviewed in Australia on 9 October 2021

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It’s absolutely wonderful to lose yourself in a great novel that you trust completely. Franzen has created a family of six: father Russ, a pastor from a Mennonite background; wife Marion from a Jewish Catholic background and their four kids: Clem, Becky, Perry and sunny Judson. The time is the seventies. The place is a country town near Chicago. At their church, Russ is the assistant minister. He has given up control of the youth group Crossroads to Rick Ambrose in trying circumstances. He’s attracted to a foxy new congregant, Frances. Clem and Becky are super-close, but their camaraderie shifts when he goes to college and gets a girlfriend, under whose influence he decides to turn himself over to the draft board for Vietnam. Perry is super intelligent, emotional, off-putting to his father and into drugs. Marion, once the talented sprite over whom Russ marvelled is now dumpy and careworn. She comes into much sharper view later on when her horrifying backstory is revealed.

Chapter by chapter, the story of family developments is carried forward by concentrating on one character at a time. Franzen builds a complex, layered view of each psyche and how much each person knows and understands the others which frankly, is gob-smacking in its brilliance. Our sympathies wax and wane for each of them as the annual Crossroads trip to help out in Navaho country approaches and Russ does all he can to seal his fate with Frances. Once there, there’s a disaster that has far reaching consequences and by the end of the novel you wonder what’s in store for this fractured family. Luckily, this is the first of a trilogy. This would be an excellent novel for a non-Christian to read to understand how Christianity has formed the culture of the US. It’s very worthy, except when it’s not. This is one of those books that make you dubious about picking up the next book on your pile (or tablet) because no doubt, the next book will not be as good.

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Pam

Great book fast delivery

Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2022

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Great book fast delivery

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John Lawless

Roll on Volume 2

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2021

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Franzen is acknowledged to be one of the top living novelists in America. In his “Crossroads” he has demonstrated yet again why he has retained this accolade for so long. A small number of readers loath him but I think the reason is that they just don’t get his style. Here is an author who can convey poignancy and humour in the space of a single sentence. When his characters compromise themselves and end up in a Catch 22 situation, Franzen is in the background with a wry smile saying “look what I got you into”. “Crossroads” is reputed to be the first in a trilogy and interestingly as you come to towards the denouement, you can see traces of where the story might go in Volume 2. He has adopted an interesting structure for this novel; The first 180 pages consist of five chapters, each one told from the point of view of a different character. Most of the action takes place over the course of one day. This allows him to do what he is best at; by means of a style that is both sharp and empathic he excavates deeply into the core of the persona of each of his main characters. For example, his depiction of the mental illness of Marion should be required reading for all psychiatric health professionals as it gives a fresh insight into what a breakdown must really feels like. It’s classic. The book can be read at so many levels; from a tour de force of literary style to a good story with a comic twist. However, and this seems a new departure for Franzen, it could be argued that he has tackled that fundamental moral and philosophical question “What does it really mean to be good”. The 1970’s context also adds colour and of course he is spot on in his understanding of the culture of that decade. Here is a novel that is vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. I felt cheated after 580 pages as I did not want it to end. Roll on Volume 2.

13 people found this helpful

Kindle Customerdavid 2

What a tiring read.......

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 November 2021

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Reached the end, though don't know how or why. Author uses ten words when one would do, jumping confusingly from one time frame to another. This is supposedly the first in a trilogy...... well, count me out from the rest

7 people found this helpful

I-grantha

A novel without the magic of fiction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 March 2022

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Franzen has lost the crucial skill of engaging the reader. It's a rule of fiction that a writer should show but not tell. Rules are made to be broken but not ignored. Franzen ignores the rule to the point of being tiresome.

Fiction is as much about what a writer leaves out as what he puts in. What is left out is filled in by the reader's imagination and empathy with the characters. That is the magic of fiction.

Franzen leaves out nothing about his characters. He describes every emotion, every thought about that emotion, every emotion about the thoughts about that emotion, every thought about the emotion about the thoughts about that emotion - ad infinitum.

In a novel with a thin plot driven by characters we end up curiously uninvolved with those characters. This is because by describing the characters in every detail, Franzen leaves the reader no room to project into them, to provide for them the elements that the author may only suggest or briefly describe. In his endless dissection of the minds of very ordinary characters Franzen destroys the magic of fiction.

One person found this helpful

Ms. T. Stuart

overly long, and not worth the read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 March 2022

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I had high hopes for this, having read and enjoyed "The Corrections". There is no faulting Franzen's psychological acuity and skewering of his characters' motivations and self-obsessions, and yet, I'm not sure that it amounted to much after 580 pages.

2 people found this helpful

Fly Me to the Moon

Superb understanding of human nature

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 February 2022

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Well worth the time and patience needed to sink into it. I would say it took me about 80 pages but then you're in.
Franzen writes people really well, all different kinds and he sinks you into the mind set of each of his characters, their frailties, their personality with great skill.
Excellent

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