When I was in my twenties, I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of the Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike, and I resolved to read one of the novels each year. I got through the first two before becoming distracted by life, but this winter, for some unknown reason, I pulled the thick book down and finally read novel number three: Rabbit is Rich. 

I found it astounding. Perhaps it had simply been too long since I had read an unashamed American realist novel, but it seemed like Updike at his best. Yes, I am aware of the myriad criticisms of Updike: relentlessly prolific, old fashioned in his political and sexual views, his protagonists entirely oversexed, etc. All of those criticisms could still be lobbied at Rabbit is Rich, but as a chunk of fiction, as an installment in the broader panorama of Harry Angstrom’s life, it’s exemplary. Like the other Rabbit novels, the third volume functions as an almost-instant retrospective look at the American decade just passed, and that decade’s excesses, inhibitions, and sins become embodied in the characters. 

All of which is great, but what I was impressed with was how effortlessly he seemed to pull off the regular old novelisms: the set pieces, the implacable situational conflict, the behavior of characters that’s simultaneously evocative of time/place/personality and also plausible — significant but not screamingly so. The novel feels both richly descriptive of a lived American reality and also richly imagined as a fictional landscape, and this ratio of observation and invention is controlled throughout. I realize these are merely characteristics of a well-done, old-fashioned realistic novel, but as someone who has intermittently attempted to do that very same activity, to see it pulled off with this level of apparent effortlessness is astonishing. It’s like watching an Olympic athlete flip and twist across a padded floor, their hummingbird breathing at the end nearly hidden by their beaming smile. I understand enough about novel writing to know how hard it is to do what he’s doing without it seeming hard. Perhaps I’m just a bad novelist. It’s possible! But still: I’d kill to be able to write like this. 

For Christmas, I received a newer novel: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I was in my 30s when I broke down and finally started reading Franzen’s novels. I had read his essays, a less intimidating backdoor into his oeuvre, but The Corrections received so much praise when I was in grad school that I studiously avoided it. As if I were picking sides in the Twilight saga, I was devoutly team DFW. But finally I broke down and read Freedom and then the floodgates opened: The Corrections, then Purity, and now Crossroads. In the meantime, Franzen has become a metonymy for the sins of postwar American male literary success. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. Something about his public persona and his success annoys a certain kind of online literary young person, and the result is that every time he makes any kind of public utterance, or every time he publishes a new book, there is an endless amount of commentary about how wrong Franzen is. And I partially sympathize: he can be insufferable, humorless, at his worst a kind of deliberate troll regarding environmental issues. He’s the kind of person who thinks he’s got an excellent sense of humor. Is this the kind of person he really is, or is this just how he comes across in the pinhole understanding we have of him via his nonfiction writing and his interviews? 

My answer is another question: who cares? Having a strong opinion on Franzen’s latest media utterance as a replacement for actually being well-read is unhealthy. Sorry. It would be easier to be a literate person if they removed the blurbs, the fetching author photographs, and the online interviews, the noise pollution of publicity. Until that day, we have to be more rigorous in our attention. The author is not dead, but it’s sometimes easier to pretend he is. 

What I care about is the fiction, where all of his faults and excesses coalesce and reverse into a greater rhetorical artifact. It must be said: Franzen is an exceptional novelist. Is he essentially an old-fashioned realistic novelist according to generally acceptable terms? Yes. Are there a conspicuous number of tried-and-true novelistic plot conventions in this latest novel? Namely, accidental pregnancy, psychological breakdown, drug use as character revelation and plot instigator, similar use of crisis of faith? Yes. One thing is sure: he’s not writing fragmentary autofiction that questions its own status as a work of linguistic artifice. What he’s doing instead is much simpler and much more pleasurable: a double-decker sodbuster of a family saga. This is obviously Franzen’s forte. And sections of Crossroads succeed as powerfully as any other novel of his that I’ve read. The novel-length first section, “Advent,” is remarkable. The novel concerns a pastor experiencing a midlife crisis, his four children, and his wife. Everyone except the youngest child (10) is barrelling toward a reckoning, and it all collides two nights before Christmas in a suburb of Chicago in 1971. Updike’s brand of routine excellence also manifests here. Franzen’s ability to juggle multiple plot strands and make it interesting and relevant and pull you along, so that it feels less like you’re reading and more like you are succumbing to some tidal undertow of events, is overwhelming. I would kill to be able to write like this. He doesn’t have the same level of prose as Updike, whose mission it seemed was to describe everything on the planet in his eloquent high-def style. At times, that style is perfect for what is being described, and at times it’s awful, insufferable, tasteless. Though I understand this criticism of Updike, I am sympathetic because it seems essentially instinctive. He’s got this Paul McCartney–like helplessness before the staggering plenitude of his own talent. The dog will always roll in the stink; it’s how he proves he’s alive. Franzen’s prose is different and has changed since The Corrections. It’s less fussily aware of itself as language. It’s clearer. It doesn’t dance as hard as it used to. It’s not particularly voice-driven, either in terms of its author’s own constant God-like baritone, or in terms of a more Faulkner-like deep-character ventriloquism. It’s more of the transparent window pane rather than the swirling disco ball. There are nice phrases, to be sure, but one rarely slows up attentionally to ponder them. But at the same time it’s not cliched. It’s not sloppy, it’s not breezy, and it’s not filmic. He’s not a benign prose stylist in this novel. And that middle ground is itself incredibly difficult. Though I don’t agree with Martin Amis, that a good novel is exemplified by a long marginal line of excitement drawn down the page cheering on each innovative utterance (moderation in all things, Marty), I do enjoy the shock of new language. But this goal of sentence-level innovation is often antithetical to moving a novel along, to submerging oneself in the novelistic dream of the characters. In Crossroads, the dream is everything. 

Does it get a little rickety, plot-wise toward the end of the first section? Yes. Does it feel a little too much like a P.T. Anderson movie where everyone’s storm of pain happens to rain on the same exact evening in a way that seems a little too conveniently dramatic? Yes. Does the novel ultimately hinge on a couple of characters’ deeply held beliefs that remain unpersuasive to this reader? Yes. Are the primary members of the Hildebrandt family all weirdly destructive moral absolutists, none of whom have a restraining thread of common sense? Yes. Pastor Russ’s break from his family’s Mennonite faith, his love of Navajo culture, his difficulties with his own faith all seem slightly less than convincing. He has an orientalist fascination with “authentic” blues records, an affectation which is lightly ironized at one point in the novel. But his larger infatuation toward the Navajo people, which seems like a deeper version of the same search for a more authentic culture distinct from his own, doesn’t have any irony attached to it. Perhaps I am just misreading. Likewise, the novel-binding affection between Clem, his oldest son, and Becky, lone sister, seems rather baffling. At the end of the first section, which essentially occurs over one long day, there are so many confrontations and crises that they lose emphasis. Like a group of streakers at a football game, it becomes difficult to distinguish which revelation sprinting across your field of vision is important. In its attempt to braid together so much narrative information, one loses a sense of proportion. But then, who said novels were about proportion? That sounds like the griping of an envious short story writer. 

Aside from the complementary excellence between Updike and Franzen, there is an interesting plot device parallel in both novels: they both are primarily concerned with a middle-aged patriarch’s adulterous fantasies. In each there is a focal point for this fantasy. For Rabbit, it’s Cindy Murkett, the youngest wife in his country club golf set. For pastor Russ Hidlebrant, it’s Frances Cottrell, the foxy, young, widowed parishioner. Though of course there are many other elements, the wished-for consummation of this desire forms the spine of the plot, and the night of reckoning coincides with (and metaphorically seems to bring about) a crisis with their sons. In the case of Rabbit, his hoped-for rendezvous with Cindy doesn’t happen. The climactic wife-swapping-in-the-islands gambit lands him instead with Thelma Harrison, who it turns out is as obsessed with him as Rabbit is with Cindy. He awakens the next day post-coitus (yes, exhaustively described) to find out that his son Nelson has abandoned his own just-married and very pregnant wife back in the States. For Russ, he manages to bed his infatuation (in the the most depraved and pitiful and ick-worthy of circumstances), which coincides with his son having a cocaine-abetted psychological breakdown (plus some fire). Of course the sons’ crises refract the patriarch’s self-absorption and excesses. Though both novels hail from more liberal, more gently Protestant neighborhoods, this essentially simultaneous retribution strikes me as remarkably Southern Baptist, as plot devices go.

To further complicate matters, the novels also share marriages that endure in spite of the wayward husbands and wives. In each, both spouses are conflicted, adulterous, or at least adultery-adjacent. Neither split but are somehow stronger despite being each other’s rusty foil for most of the novel. There is a strange resilience to their antagonisms, as if the antagonism between husband and wife strengthens their bond. These chronicles of wayward females and libidinally distracted men somehow transmogrify into odes for marriage. It echoes an observation from the real world: That many long-term successful marriages are opaque, unknowable accomplishments, like obelisks appearing in the desert. At the right angle and distance the marriages almost seem like cults of two. The most surprising part of each novel in the end are the portraits of these conjugal cults — cults that exist at the center of the family island, beating the drum of civilization. 

Despite Franzen’s role as despised Literary Man, the novelist he currently reminds me of is yet another John — John Irving. He also wrote plot-stuffed, continent-spanning, energetically goofy novels that are essentially unputdownable if one submits to them. (Thank God Franzen avoids bears and wrestling.) I’m not saying it’s the highest aesthetic achievement in the bookstore (though all ranking is bunk), but it ain’t nothing either.