Adam Begley

God is everywhere, sometimes in strange guises, in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads

A protestant minister clings to prayer and the gospel; his wife and daughter have visions, while his son believes himself to be the Supreme Being

Jonathan Franzen. [Getty Images] 
issue 23 October 2021

Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and aggressively clever, the novel did more than display its author’s spiky brilliance. A stubborn moral core, in the person of the ailing patriarch of the Lambert family, and a tangled web of fierce emotion binding him and his wife and three children, gave it powerful resonance.

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