Russ, an associate minister at First Reformed Church, flirts with a young widow, Frances Cottrell, and stews over his rivalry with the charismatic Rick Ambrose.

Initially she attends Crossroads at the urging of Tanner Evans – "a bell-bottomed dreamboat" and aspiring musician on whom she has a crush – but eventually has a religious awakening of her own.

Clem, on the other hand, has had a sexual awakening with his college girlfriend Sharon, but he decides to end the relationship, drop out of school, and forfeit his draft deferral in order to fight in the Vietnam War out of a sense of moral obligation.

Meanwhile, Marion is surreptitiously attending therapy sessions, at which she recounts traumatic episodes from her past, including an affair with a married man named Bradley Grant and a subsequent psychiatric breakdown.

These episodes took place in Los Angeles shortly before she met Russ, and Marion has hidden them from her family, despite her increasing concern for Perry's mental stability.

Marion is on vacation in California, ostensibly taking Judson to Disneyland and visiting an uncle, but in fact attempting to rekindle her relationship with Bradley.

Perry has developed a cocaine addiction and, also with Crossroads in Arizona but neglected by Russ, he ends up in hospital after overdosing, being robbed, and committing arson.

Becky has also fallen out with Clem, who – sent away by the draft board – embarked on a lengthy journey through Central and South America, becoming a jaded day laborer.

[7] As a teenager, Franzen belonged to a church youth group called Fellowship, which is the subject of his essay "The Joy Breaks Through" in The Discomfort Zone and which resembles Crossroads.

However, in Crossroads, Franzen approached religion as primarily "an emotional experience":It wasn't my conscious intention, but I think I produced a book that has essentially no theology in it...

"[7] Franzen has also said that he found it appealing to write about the past, rather than the present, during the years of the Trump administration, which he felt he "could not make sense of in real time.

"[14] According to The Times Literary Supplement:Crossroads is largely free from the vices to which Franzen's previous work has been addicted: the self-conscious topicality; the show-off sophistication; the formal heavy-handedness.

[21] The Brooklyn Rail, arguing that Russ's story "read as if it's been told too often in American fiction," regretted that Franzen had not further developed the storylines involving the Navajo, a black inner-city church, and the female Hildebrandts, Marion and Becky.

[10][24] According to the Chicago Review of Books:Maybe the most attractive aspect of Crossroads is its depth of moral, capitalist, and religious contemplation—discursions that thankfully do not present via authorial (or authoritative) monologues... Franzen has reinvigorated the contemporary novel by offering a vision for how fiction can still serve as the preeminent vehicle for exploring humanity's most consequential ideas.

Sometimes his attempts to square those two scales are successful... [But] he is at his finest when writing about the Midwest, the middle class, midlife crises, middlingness in general.

In such moments, the characters seem subservient to a set of ideas...[24]The New Republic said that the role of "materially starved-but-spiritually rich indigenous people" in the novel suggested that "[t]here is a critique to be made here about neocolonialism and the white man's fantasy of the exotic Other.

"[10] In the Irish Independent, Naoise Dolan criticised the novel's portrayal of women and people of color, allowing that it accurately depicted "a particular consciousness" but questioning its literary value.

Rumaan Alam, writing for The Nation, noted a dearth of "lovely sentences" in Crossroads, but said that the middling prose style is compensated for by "the charms of plot and momentum, characters and conversation.

"[16] Similarly, an otherwise positive review in The Times suggested that "the prose is bad" and described Franzen as "a major writer with a minor style," though he remains "highly readable.