Book of the week: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s new book is an absorbing look at the ‘last, confused years of the Age of Aquarius’

Jonathan Franzen
(Image credit: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

“The pandemic novels are coming,” said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Having featured tangentially in recent works by Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney, lockdown is “far from a garnish” in Sarah Hall’s doomy “tale of sex and death”.

Edith, the narrator, is a sculptor in her late 50s, recalling a time, 20 years ago, when Britain was ravaged by a fictional “deadly virus” that liquefies its victims from the inside. Edith spent much of that lockdown in bed with Halit, her Turkish lover, said Claire Allfree in The Times.

She graphically describes their sex – with references to menstrual blood and “peculiar positions”. Although sometimes a bit of a “hotchpotch of ideas”, Burntcoat is elegantly written and captures the “grief-stricken, suffocatingly interior quality” of life during a pandemic.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Also fascinating are Edith’s “almost metaphysical musings on the virus”, which is slowly killing her 20 years on, said Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman. It is, she notes, “perfectly composed, star-like, and timed for the greatest chaos”. Of the many Covid-inspired books we’ll see, “few will be as finely wrought, intellectually brave and emotionally honest as this is”.

Faber 224pp £12.99; The Week Bookshop £9.99

Burncoat book cover

The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.