Crossroads

Of all the things a novelist can do, Jonathan Franzen is among the best at one of the most important: creating full, human characters who make terrible decisions, again and again. In Crossroads, those characters are the Hildebrandts, a family of six in suburban Chicago in December 1971, each of them vivid and flawed, thwarted by their own essence but capable, possibly, of change. A suburban Christian youth group (which gives the novel its name) may not sound like a promising subject for a 592-page novel, but in Franzen's hands it's rich and fertile ground, not just for satire but for a fully populated world of actions and consequences that left me looking forward to the rest of the trilogy that Franzen has said will follow.