Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, is the first in a trilogy called “A Key to All Myth­ol­ogies,” in homage to the Reverend Edward Casaubon’s scholarly enterprise in Middlemarch. You may have heard from Franzen’s haters that he is pompous, self-regarding, and Victorian in sensibility. Certainly his lofty invocation of George Eliot is in keeping with all of that. But you should know, because he wants you to know, that Franzen can laugh at himself. He’s having a bit of fun not only with the less flattering aspects of his reputation but also with his own mortality. “Casaubon dies,” Franzen reminded an interviewer, “before he finishes his project. And undertaking writing three books in my 60s, I thought, ‘Well, that’s a funny little joke.’”

It’s more than a joke, though, and Franzen knows it. This sly memento mori is a way of concentrating the mind, his own and the reader’s. The questions posed and themes attacked in Crossroads and its sequels must be the ones that matter most to Franzen. This project may be viewed as a culmination, an endorsement of a way of looking at the world. Previous Franzen novels an­nounced their concerns with bluntly grandiose titles such as “Freedom” (2010) and “Purity” (2015). “Goodness” being too buttery, perhaps, even for corn-fed Franzen, he settled on “Crossroads,” a title that alludes to Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Cross Road Blues” and to John­son’s fabled pact with the devil; to Eric Clapton’s whitebread late-1960s cover; to Christ’s cross; and above all to the challenge of moral and ethical decision-making.

Is Crossroads middlebrow to a mercenary degree? Is it Victorian in its openhanded accessibility? Why not, as with the best of Dickens, both? Fran­zen is intrigued by the sulfurous pit between being good and merely seeming so; he is also guiltily fascinated by his own greatest temptation, the impulse to have it both ways. What better laboratory for his inquiries than a Christian youth group, also called Crossroads, wherein adults and children try to seem good, and to feel that they are good, without having to forfeit what they really want: sex, drugs, novelty, popularity, status, and the right kind of high opinion of themselves, which is to say the kind that can be achieved least painfully. The broader setting, a fictitious Chicago suburb called “New Prospect,” in the waning days of 1971, filled with such Spoon River Anthology descendants as “Dwight Haefle” and “Sally Perkins” and “Biff Allard,” is every bit as deceptively boring as the youth group.

In keeping with Franzen’s standard operating procedure, Crossroads uses fractured family dynamics to explore the ways people hide from and manipulate and betray one another. The patriarch of his not-so-model family is Russ Hildebrandt, the pastor of New Prospect’s First Reformed Church and erstwhile head of Crossroads. His reluctant nemesis is Rick Ambrose, the younger, hipper, dismayingly popular co-leader of Crossroads, who has been steadily and effortlessly eroding Russ’s authority. Where Russ is awkward, self-pitying, and wedded to a drearily Bible-based youth ministry, Rick is socially adept, plugged in to both the burgeoning counter­culture and the therapeutic vogue that has turned Crossroads into a radically authentic morass of crying, hugging, and secret-sharing.

But Russ is worse than just a sweaty old fart who harshes everyone’s mellow. He is a pathetic, selfish hypocrite. He recoils from his wife, Marion, in disgust. He lusts after, and pursues, a young, widowed parishioner named Frances Cottrell. In hopes of seeming cool and good, he trades shamelessly on his past civil-rights work, his present inner-city service work, his old blues records (plus ça change), and his shearling coat. That nobody is fooled only stuffs him deeper into a cubby of self-loathing. His children make no pretense of respecting him, though they have only a partial view of what is driving his rapid descent. Russ’s pacifist Mennonite background is de­scribed in vivid, moving flashback, and deftly used to set up brutal tests of his authority within both Crossroads and his own family.

The reader’s opinion of Russ isn’t helped by exposure to the women in his life. In his eyes his wife is merely overweight and exhausted, but her backstory is marked by sexual trauma, de­pression, and wrestling with sin and guilt to which Russ is utterly oblivious. (The diabolical associations of the book’s title are, we learn, no accident.) In the present day, Marion sees a therapist on the sly, and takes steps toward reciprocating Russ’s infidelity. Whereas Russ’s flexible approach to sin (might his desired union with Frances represent, somehow, a turning toward ecstatic union with God?) makes his Christian morals seem vestigial and hollow, Marion’s conscience is a crater of smoking brimstone. She is a creature as fallen, as thirsty for grace, as any character in Greene or O’Connor, and alongside her struggles Frances Cottrell looks empty-headed and insubstantial, a fondant confection dissolving in the rain.

Crossroads also alternates between the close third-person perspectives of Russ and Marion’s eldest three children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. (The youngest, Judson, presumably appears in this book only so that he can grow up in its sequels.) Each staggers beneath the weight of a major moral quandary, which would seem too symmetrical were it not also so true to the vagaries of growing up in a turbulent era. Clem, half mad with embarrassment at his father’s disintegrating public face, toys with rejecting Russ’s pacifism, giving up his student deferment, and packing off to the Vietnam War. Becky, seduced by the promise of popularity and pleasure, steals a classmate’s boyfriend, mistakes a drug misadventure for a mystical experience, and is forced to decide how selfish to be with an un­expected inheritance.

Unsavory ulterior motives abound, most conspicuously and self-consciously in the case of Perry, the young “ge­nius” and budding drug dealer of the Hildebrandt clan. Perry, whose brilliance is evident only in his big vocabulary and precocious philosophizing, may be a key to Franzen’s personal mythology; he will either appeal to or embarrass anyone who grew up feeling intellectually superior to his environment. It is Perry who wonders most explicitly what it means to be a good person. It is Perry who wonders if he should give up drugs — selling and taking them — to be a better person. It is Perry who drunkenly interrogates a rabbi and a priest at an adult Christmas party: Is it possible to be good without succumbing to pride in one’s goodness?

It may be a symptom of our etiolated moral imagination that such a homely paradox, remarked by Benjamin Frank­lin (“There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride . . .”) and innumerable others, should be a plausible hallmark of moral genius. Perry’s objection should occur to every virtue-signaling American as naturally as breathing. Franzen deserves credit for returning it to the public’s blinkered attention. But he deserves a demerit for exoticizing it. There is nothing terribly perceptive (cf. the “Bad Art Friend” debacle) about noticing the difference between public and private motivation. One unsettling lesson of Crossroads is that many people have no idea how transparent they are.

Crossroads is hard to put down, hard not to like, but hard to enthuse about, too. Franzen’s plot, with its flawless pacing, skillful misdirection, and big barn-burning set pieces, is everything we expect from what he calls a “contract” novel, one in which the reader’s pleasure is paramount. But his prose is nothing to write home about, not even if home is a dull midwestern suburb. It is difficult to read Crossroads without missing the linguistic and theological treasures of another bad-priest novel, John Updike’s A Month of Sundays. Franzen is too cautious. His nonstick prose lacks any burrs or imperfections for the mind to seize upon. Too many sentences are technically sophisticated but devoid of personality: Marion “proceeded past trees whose bark was darkened by the moisture their frozenness had condensed, past residential façades no longer promising the marital stability they had in the forties, when they were built.” No wonder this book is nearly 600 pages long.

Yet the story itself has a real warmth and vitality. Franzen is a humane ob­server of weakness, which requires honesty about oneself as well as others. He looks, and probably knows it, like he’s trying to have a few things both ways: apologizing for his white maleness (as Russ Hildebrandt does, a bit anachronistically, both in the black inner city and on a Navajo reservation) while remaining uncontested top dog; cultivating a highbrow reputation de­spite the very calculated accessibility of his novels; yearning to be liked while bearing the bad news that we all take our goodness for granted. Oh well. He’s only human. In any case, Crossroads is pointing us in the right direction.