Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, the first volume of a planned trilogy titled A Key to All Mythologies, returns to the family novel that made his name with The Corrections and Freedom. The book centers on the Hildebrandt family of New Prospect, Illinois, in December 1971. Russ Hildebrandt is an associate pastor at a liberal suburban church, recently humiliated by being eased out of the youth ministry called Crossroads in favor of a younger, charismatic rival; he is contemplating an affair. His wife Marion is in secret therapy, fighting to keep a past she has hidden from the family from breaking through. Their three older children—Clem, the morally absolutist eldest, recently giving up his college deferment in protest; Becky, the high school golden girl drifting into the church youth group; and Perry, the brilliant younger brother whose drug use and ambitions threaten to spiral out of control—each take long, separately voiced sections. Franzen treats religious belief with unusual seriousness for a contemporary novelist; the moral lives of the Hildebrandts are genuinely theological, not just psychological. The book is structurally a domestic novel but reaches outward into the politics of late Vietnam, white liberal Christianity, the Navajo reservation, and the early stirrings of evangelicalism. It is widely considered one of Franzen's strongest novels.