Crossroads

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Sections 1-2

Part 1, Sections 3-4

Part 1, Section 5

Part 1, Sections 6-9

Part 1, Sections 10-12

Part 1, Sections 13-19

Part 2, Section 20, Pages 373-450

Part 2, Section 20, Pages 450-479

Part 2, Sections 21-22

Part 2, Sections 23-24

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Sections 3-4 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Advent”

Part 1, Section 3 Summary

Becky, the second Hildebrandt child, wakes up happy and excited after experiencing her first kiss the night before. She decides to work on her college essays, which direct her to write about someone she admires. She chooses her older brother, Clem, the sibling she has always been closest to, and her Aunt Shirley, who died less than a year before from lung cancer.

Aunt Shirley, a former Broadway actress, did not attempt to hide that Becky was her favorite Hildebrandt child. She and Marion, Shirley’s sister and Becky’s mother, did not get along well, however. Shirley was jealous of Marion’s family while Marion assumed Shirley thought less of her for having a “normal” suburban life. Shirley left Becky $13,000 in her will, specifying that Becky should use it to go to Europe. Her parents want her to split it with her brothers instead. She could still take a trip to Europe with her portion, though it would be less lavish.

The money is not the only change in Becky’s life in the weeks leading up to her essay-writing morning. An attractive musician who recently graduated from her high school, Tanner Evans, plays in a band at the restaurant where she works. To Becky’s dismay, Tanner has a girlfriend: Laura Dobrinsky, the singer in his band. Hoping to impress him, weeks earlier she took his suggestion that she try attending Crossroads, which he enjoyed in high school. Becky liked her initial forays into Crossroads more than she thought she would. Rick Ambrose obviously favored her and began confiding in her often, telling her he sometimes worries that the group is becoming merely an “extended kind of psychological experiment” (74) rather than an experience that brings teens close to God.

When Clem came home from college for Thanksgiving, he told Becky that Laura was behind the effort to get their father kicked out of Crossroads. He also confronted Russ about the $13,000, telling him to let Becky use the money however she wants.

Deciding to ramp up her efforts to get close to Tanner through religion, Becky began attending First Reformed, which she had not done for years, because she heard Tanner is a regular attendee. They sat next to each other on Sundays and had long talks after the services. After several weeks, the two kissed in the restaurant’s parking lot. Although Becky is elated as she sits the next morning writing her essays and remembering the kiss, she wishes she had waited until he officially broke up with Laura.

Part 1, Section 4 Summary

Clem, the eldest Hildebrandt child, finishes his final paper for the fall semester at the University of Illinois. He then writes a note to the military saying he is no longer a college student and therefore is no longer eligible for a student deferment from the Vietnam War draft.

Clem has arrived at this decision after conversations with his girlfriend, Sharon, whose brother is in the military. Sharon challenged Clem to consider the immorality of poor young men and young men of color disproportionately having to fight, while men like Clem do not have to make the same sacrifice. Clem eventually decided the only way to avoid moral hypocrisy was to give up his student deferment, even though the actual combat of the war is slowing by this point.

Because he will be leaving college, Clem decides he must break up with Sharon. While he imagined her congratulating him for the consistency of his morals, she instead yells at him, saying she cannot cope with having both her brother and him in danger. When he leaves her apartment, he almost immediately regrets the way he told her and the decision itself.

On his walk from Sharon’s apartment, Clem reflects on the fact that he wrote the letter mainly to prove his moral strength to his father. He has lost respect for Russ ever since the incident that resulted in Russ leaving Crossroads, the same incident alluded to in Section 1 as Russ’s humiliation.

When Ambrose joined Russ in leading Crossroads three years before the action of the novel, he brought a sense of authenticity that many young people admired, leading Tanner Evans to join and bring his popular friends with him. They gravitated toward Ambrose, seeing Russ only as an annoyance. On the group’s spring trip to Arizona, an annual event where the youth group does acts of service for a Navajo reservation, this group visibly resented Russ’s efforts to curry favor with them.

Ten days after the trip, at a regular Sunday night Crossroads meeting, the tensions finally erupted. Laura, Tanner’s girlfriend, and a group of her friends challenged Russ, complaining about his traditional forms of worship. Clem stood up for his father, publicly reminding the group of all the experience and good intentions that Russ brought to the ministry.

When Russ spoke for himself, however, he did not fight back, instead apologizing and proposing he could learn from the group’s comments. Laura and her group proved victorious: Ambrose suggested to Russ in a private conversation that he should leave. Clem felt sickened by his father’s weakness. Russ now seems like a fool to him, a pathetic middle-aged man who still needs to be liked by teens. By signing up for Vietnam, he wants to show Russ that he, Clem, has the strength of his convictions, even if Russ does not.

Part 1, Sections 3-4 Analysis

Like most teenagers, Becky is trying to figure who she wants to be with respect to romance and sexuality. While she only kisses Tanner in this section, this event feels like a big step, as she is going from no romantic experience at all to kissing a boy who already has a girlfriend. To complicate matters further, her relationship with Tanner becomes inextricably linked to her relationship with faith. She only gets involved in Crossroads on his insistence, and later she only resumes attending church because he attends. While normal teenage rebellion often involves wandering away from a parent’s religion, Becky’s involves wandering back toward her parents’ Christianity, but separate from their guidance or involvement. The fact that she rediscovers faith without Russ and practices in a different way will later become one of many conflicts boiling under the surface of the father-daughter relationship.

Clem, not unlike Perry, is on a journey to figure out what morality means to him. As commonly happens with young adults just starting to explore the world through college, work, or travel, Clem is struggling to figure out how he wants to incorporate new experiences into his identity. When the reader meets him, he sees morality as a simple set of principles that involve no grey areas or nuances. Once he determines that Sharon is right about the injustice of who has to fight in Vietnam and who gets to avoid fighting, he sees the only path forward as reversing this injustice with his own life. He refuses to let the fact that his service will hurt people enter into his thinking. His family and girlfriend may be wracked with worry over his fate, but to him that only makes the sacrifice more meaningful.

Franzen’s characterization does not suggest that Clem is wrong in his decision to give up deferment, but it does show that Clem’s morality may not be as sophisticated as he thinks it is. Just as he does not respect his father’s prioritization of group harmony over principles at the disastrous Crossroads meeting, he also does not respect the idea of prioritizing his loved one’s feelings over his principles. Whether Clem’s decision is right or wrong, he still has much to learn about the undeniable fact that many moral choices are often inherently complex and nuanced, rather than straightforward and mathematical.