Jonathan Franzen’s new novel ‘Crossroads’ is set in the Chicago ‘burbs and launches a trilogy. He knows you already have an opinion about it.

This new book by Jonathan Franzen, sigh, is terrific.

In fact, “Crossroads” is one of his best, overflowing with family crisis, morality, mundanity — a nearly 19th century potboiler of ordinariness, across 600 pages, set in suburban Chicago. It is the first of a trilogy saddled with a weighty title: “The Key to All Mythologies,” itself a nod to “Middlemarch.” It is, in other words, that most Franzen of Franzen family epics, civic, private, encompassing, engrossing. Which will annoy certain people. Franzen, child of Western Springs, chronicler of contemporary America, Exhibit A of the Great White Male American Novelist (circa 2021), reflexively detested, never arrives on the page now without a huff, a herald or a hand-wringing. He seems to publish only once he has held a finger in the wind and decoded what ails us. Which is a novelist’s job description.

But since this is Franzen, because the haters don’t even want to look at his smug face, because of his tortured history of irritating social media and Oprah’s Book Club (he was hesitant when Oprah picked “The Corrections”) it gets hard to ignore reputation (snob, Luddite, Oprah denier), and, well ... you know you’re divisive when even the Audubon Society has problems with you.

“It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen,” the editor of Audubon magazine once wrote, in response to