Crossroads paints a picture of a bygone era, one when cigarettes outnumbered guitars in the church parking lot by a factor of ten.
The language of the group (a ministry of the fictional First Reformed Church in New Prospect, Illinois) is more psychological than spiritual, its character more in line with the confrontational self-help ethos of the support groups that were gaining traction at the time than the “Big E” evangelicalism that was emerging alongside. Instead, the group bears a distinctly mainline Protestant character, albeit in its early-1970s incarnation, the period in which the novel is set. There are no Bible studies, no prayer circles, no games of capture the flag, no tracts. Which is not meant as faint praise so much as an acknowledgement of the peculiarity of a work like this coming into existence in the first place, much less in 2021.Ĭrossroads is not the sort of youth group that most contemporary readers will associate with the term, however. Crossroads, the name of both the book and the group, may even be the finest work of fiction ever written on the subject. The panoramic new novel from Jonathan Franzen is about, among many other things, a church youth group.
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