Crossroads

The white characters’ interactions with Indigenous culture form a motif throughout the novel. They are a perfect example of faults and virtues colliding, and of the frequent mismatch between intentions and actions. When Russ first seeks out the Navajo reservation as a young man during World War II, he goes out of a genuine interest in the culture. He has no intention to play the “white savior” role; he just wants to work and live with them for a few months. However, later in his life, he comes to realize that maybe the people there did not particularly like him, and that maybe he was oblivious to how one-sided the “friendship” was. He got something from the experience but gave little or nothing in return.

This question is underlined further by the annual Crossroads trips to the Navajo reservation. These trips have enormous significance. One such trip lays the groundwork for Russ’s ousting from the group, which haunts him in the novel’s present and provides much of the resentment that fuels his bad decisions. The trip that takes place in the present in 1972 could arguably be called the climax of the book; it is where Russ finally has sex with Frances Cottrell, his goal since the novel’s opening page, only to find that Perry has changed the family’s lives forever with his thievery, arson, arrest, and suicide attempt.

What is notably missing from these significant moments in the Arizona trips is any interaction with Navajo people themselves. The trips are more of a theater where various Crossroads-related dramas play out than a meaningful experience with Navajo culture. Nothing better exemplifies this than Russ’s brief conversation with Clyde when he recovers the two guitars Clyde stole from some Crossroads members. Russ essentially steamrolls Clyde while thinking he is being an ally, continuously pressing him to come talk to the Crossroads teens about his family’s hardships—as if Clyde would get anything out of parading his hardships in front of a group of religious tourists who will go back to their more comfortable lives in a week. Clyde is forced to explain to Russ his enormous frustration that a cavalcade of institutions are set up to keep his family poor, no matter how many church groups swing by for annual trips to “help.” Rather than being sobered by this message, Frances leaves the interaction in a state of sexual arousal over how “well” Russ handled the situation, leading to Russ and Frances having sex for the first time.

Franzen does not attempt a deep look into Native culture—probably wisely, given that he has no personal experience or intimate knowledge of it. But he does offer enough glimpses into it to make readers question the effects of the Crossroads group trips more deeply than the Crossroads group members themselves think about them. While most members of the group consider themselves part of the liberal, progressive, countercultural wave of the 1960s and 1970s, few of them stop to reflect on the extent to which they make Native culture a prop in their stories. They use the annual trips to make themselves feel helpful, not to learn about the Navajo.