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 2, Section 20, Pages 373-450Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Easter”

Part 2, Section 20, Pages 373-408 Summary

In the weeks after Christmas, Perry assures his parents that he has quit all drug use, and Marion begins losing weight by smoking constantly and going on long walks.

In anticipation of the annual Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ gets a call from Keith Durochie, a Navajo elder who has been Russ’ primary contact with the area for decades. Keith tells Russ that his group should not go to one particular work site, Kitsillie, because of ongoing arguments on the reservation. Russ, however, plans to go to Kitsillie anyway.

Weeks later, Frances and Russ set a date for their long-awaited “experiment” with marijuana. When they meet one weekday morning and start smoking, Russ quickly gets paranoid while Frances becomes affectionate, wrapping her arms around him. Russ cannot shake his paranoia and decides he should leave, but as soon as the high starts to fade he berates himself for missing an opportunity to initiate something romantic with her.

The morning of the Arizona trip, Russ waits anxiously to see if Frances will show up. He is thrilled that she does, but then one of the teens tells him that Perry is in the bathroom, seemingly high on amphetamines. Irritated that Perry’s drug use is derailing his attempts with Frances, Russ goes to the bathroom to find him. Perry speaks in jumpy, bewildering sentences that seem to make sense to him but that Russ cannot follow, all the while assuring his father that he is ready for the trip. Although it seems like a bad idea to take him, Marion has already left for a visit to Los Angeles with Judson, meaning Russ has nowhere to send Perry. Staying home himself and missing his opportunity for one-on-one time with Frances is not an option he is willing to consider, so he ushers Perry onto the bus.

Part 2, Section 20, Pages 409-450 Summary

The narrative flashes back to Russ’s childhood in a Mennonite community in Lower Hebron, Indiana. He enjoyed the secluded religious life of the Mennonite community until his teen years, when his parents’ uncompromising morality started to bother him.

During World War II, Russ took a position in a military unit stationed in Arizona to do forestry work, avoiding combat as a religious conscientious objector. One day, Keith Durochie’s father came to the troop’s camp to ask them why they were doing unnecessary forestry when the nearby Navajo reservation had dire needs. Russ’s superior explained he could not act contrary to orders. Nevertheless, he let Russ spend over a month with the Navajo people, reasoning that the military cared so little about the troop’s projects that no one in leadership would notice his absence.

Russ’s weeks on the Navajo reservation had a lasting effect. As he learned about their practices and beliefs, he began to question that the religion in which he was raised was the only valid way to approach God. By the end of the experience, he still identified as a Christian, but one with greater acceptance of other faiths. It was also during this period that Russ has his first experience with sexual arousal, a feeling he had always suppressed due to guilt. He associated the Navajo mesa with “secret pleasure and permission” thereafter (430).

When he returned from his time with the Navajos, Russ began exploring other religions. He met Marion at the first Catholic church service he attended. The more he got to know her, the more he realized she had an unorthodox kind of faith. She lived with her Uncle Jimmy and his romantic partner, Antonio, not bothered or judgmental about their gay relationship as Russ would have expected. Moreover, she maintained a curiosity about her faith, sometimes asking questions that conservative Catholics would consider provocative.

They started dating, and Russ was enamored of Marion, who seemed smarter than him and was more experienced in the world, having traveled and lived in different places. He sacrificed his relationship with his parents for her, as they did not approve of his having a romantic partner outside the Mennonite faith.

One day, Marion revealed that she had previously been married. By this point, the reader knows this was not true, but Marion felt the need to confess that she had sex with someone before Russ, and the only way she felt comfortable doing that was to pretend the prior experience was in the confines of marriage. Her fear was well-founded; Russ was furious to learn she was not a virgin when they met, feeling that he was swindled into taking someone else’s leftovers. The only way he could reconcile his anger was if Marion would marry him, which she was happy and excited to do. While the first several years of the marriage were blissful, Russ grew to resent Marion for having had sex with two people, while he jumped into a long-term commitment with his first love and only ever had sex with her.

Part 2, Section 20, Page 373-450 Analysis

Structurally, Crossroads features two extended sections that are much longer than any other sections: one for Marion’s background and one for Russ’s. A potential reason that Marion’s comes so much sooner in the book is that hers delivers pivotal information about her character that readers could never intuit from observing her present-day self. The section on Russ’s background, on the other hand, can afford to come later in the book because it mostly reinforces and adds detail to strengths and weaknesses with which readers are already familiar. He is curious and open-minded about people who are different than him, particularly in comparison to his family of origin. While he may impose on the Navajos’ hospitality, he does so with good intentions and with a minimum of damaging self-centeredness. The annual spring Crossroads trip to Arizona proceeds from a real and decades-old connection he has to the Navajo reservation; he did not merely pick a group he considers underprivileged from a hat and decide to use them as a tool to build teenagers’ character.

However, his relationship with Marion is seriously problematic from the very beginning. In Marion’s younger self post-mental institution, the reader sees a person who feels the need for the Judeo-Christian faith for the same reason many people dislike it: because of its insistence on the reality of sin. Only by subscribing to a belief system that emphasizes sin can Marion do penance and feel any relief from her burden of guilt. When Russ comes along, she sees him as part of that penance; if she can make a relationship work with a nice Christian man like Russ, she can save herself from future trouble. She does not feel safe revealing her full self to him, though. She instinctually senses that he would react badly to the story of her past, so she tells a false, sanitized version of it, and he cannot even handle that. He sees himself in competition with her; he is the loser in the game of having interesting sexual pasts. These origins of the Russ-Marion relationship—Marion knowing Russ will judge her and using him as a form of penance, while Russ secretly resents and does not understand her—can only result in the eventual disintegration readers see in the novel’s present.