Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

Marion was inseparable from an identity that had proved to be humiliating. It had taken Frances Cottrell to redeem it.

It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.

But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.

She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Stranger yet, the other adults in Clem’s own family, his mother and his father and now Becky, modern people of high intelligence, spoke of God as though the word referred to something real. Being the nonbeliever among believers was even lonelier than being the gringo in Tres Fuentes. A gringo was different only on the surface and could look for common ground. Science and delusion had no ground in common.