Russ’ eldest child, Clem, is undergoing a crisis of ethics that leads to him attempting to give up his white privilege and go to the war in Vietnam because he doesn’t want a young black man going in his place.

Russ’ wife, Marion, is blurrily drawn at first – a dumpy housewife with an enigmatic wild past – but she soon emerges as the central presence as her past trauma and inherited mental illness resurfaces in herself and plays out in the children, the most interesting of whom is Perry, the over-articulate dope-smoking teenage son whose actions trigger the family’s eventual reckoning.

Amid all this, Russ is battling the temptation of Frances Cottrell, a young widow in his congregation, whom he is helping out with comically impure motivation.

Line by line, Franzen’s writing over the years has become less showy, less eager to impress, more sober in its drill-down to what matters. Marion’s revelation that the duration of a life is so short, what counts is how deeply each moment is lived, is also Franzen’s. Of all his novels, Crossroads is the least hectic, the least playful, and the most searching in its penetration.

The division of any novel into character-by-character sections inevitably leads to a lazy susan kind of reading. Readers choose favourites, so some sections can turn into a labour while they are waiting for the story to get back to the character they most love. The Corrections was such a triumph in part because every point-of-view character was equally vivid and engrossing.

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In Crossroads, I couldn’t help playing favourites: I found Perry so much the star of this novel, such a brilliant and funny and heartbreaking creation, I was occasionally biding time until his next appearance. Maybe I’m wrong, but Perry’s similarities to Franzen’s friend, the late David Foster Wallace, were so affecting that I couldn’t help reading him as a kind of tribute.

The climactic scene where Perry goes into the Arizona desert shows Franzen at his very best. And at his best, he’s better than anyone. But it might also be said that Perry, who gets in trouble for stealing, also commits the crime of stealing Franzen’s show.

Franzen’s principal gift, the channel through which he swims with the great practitioners, is his ability to forge connections between the very large and the very small. Much of Crossroads is written in extreme close-up – every thought and memory of the characters is turned over – yet it also has a sprawling effect, as if he is documenting an era and a moment of change that is still reverberating.

When he is on song, he has the reader experiencing personal recognition, immersive empathy with foreign souls, and some understanding of what makes our world turn. In its best passages, I sat down with this book half-wishing that this is the only thing I am ever reading. With two volumes to follow, Franzen is offering that as an option.

Malcolm Knox’s most recent novel, Bluebird, is published by Allen & Unwin.

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