In his late 40s, Russ Hildebrandt is the financially strapped associate pastor of First Reformed and New Prospect, in an affluent and very white suburb of Chicago. He pays homage to great 19th-century social realists, from George Eliot to Balzac to Dickens, while gazing unflinchingly to the ills that shape us today. Crossroads is set during Advent-mostly a single day, December 23-and the following Easter with a coda a couple of years in the future but in classic Franzen style he folds decades of backstory into his frame while meticulously following his through line.

Jonathan Franzen’s sweeping, sumptuous new novel, Crossroads, peers back at this oddball moment, post-Manson Family and pre-Watergate, when Jesus was groovy and Nixon’s America teetered beneath the stresses of Vietnam and (closer to home) the ravages of drug use and infidelity. Evenings teenagers would gather, singing folk-music hymns with spooky minor chords: We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord./And we pray that our unity may one day be restored.

The men would labor a week, perhaps two, mixing concrete to erect prefab chapels while the women taught Vacation Bible School. He founded a ministry known as “God’s Minority,” which traveled each summer to disadvantaged towns in West Virginia and Connecticut. I’d just entered grade school when my cousin was called to serve as youth pastor of my Baptist church in Tennessee. Few Gen Xers and zero millennials will recall, but there was a moment-call it 1971–when Protestant Christianity met the counterculture, when teenagers brimmed over with faith, hope, and love while wearing bell-bottom jeans and beaded necklaces, strumming guitars, even cursing and drinking beer.

Crossroads jonathan