The island nation of Mauritius lies about 500 kilometers east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It is best known for having been the home of the dodo, a flightless bird that was mercilessly picked off to extinction by Dutch sailors (and other invasive mammals like rats) who landed there in the late 16th century. Off its coast is the tiny island of Iles Aux Aigrettes. Since being designated a wildlife refuge in 1965, Iles aux Aigrettes has been the site of a sustained experiment carried out by the Mauritius Wildlife Foundation. Under the leadership of its scientific director Carl Jones, the MWF has been working to reestablish, as authentically as possible, the island’s pre-colonial ecology.
The dodo is gone forever, but the endangered pink pigeon, telfair skink, ornate day gecko and several other species have been carefully bred, a scrap of forest has been painstakingly restored, and non-indigenous animals (cats, for example) have been unceremoniously removed. The Mauritius tortoise is also extinct, so the Foundation imported a cousin species from Aldabra in the Seychelle Islands. These gentle giants, some over 200 years old, roam the trails as they will. They seem to think they have all the time in the world.
The first time I met Siraj, over a decade after he had set up shop here, I got lost, which felt ironic on a visit to a map-maker. But I had never been to Orangi Town before and I couldn’t find the right turning. Siraj is nothing if not a doer, so as soon as I called to explain, he jumped on his motorbike and drove around to find me and guide the car. Within minutes of parking up, he was deep into an explanation of the local criminal syndicates and the way they exploited the area, talking with the authority of a university professor. He often broke off to grab a specific document or diagram from the bundles of paper that surrounded him. I came to realize that this was how he made sense of his sometimes painful and chaotic surroundings: through evidence, order, information.
In processing all of this – in learning that not everything was a “me” problem, and that I wasn’t the only person going through it – I was able to start to heal. I am earnest again, in a way that annoys some people, but I no longer care.
This distinction between real and ersatz virtue is the central preoccupation of “Crossroads”—so much so that Franzen, who historically wears his thematic concerns on his dust sleeve (“Freedom,” “Purity,” “The Corrections”), might have titled this new novel “Goodness,” if the word didn’t double as an awkward exclamation. It is true that “Crossroads” is also concerned, like every Franzen novel, with the makeup and the breakdown of American families. And it is concerned, too, with the issues implied by the title he gave it: those moments in the lives of individuals and in the history of a nation when stark choices with permanent consequences must be made. But, deliberately and otherwise, the book returns again and again to the same question: What does it mean—for a person and, in a different sense, for a novel—to be good?
It’s the kind of book that feels like slipping into conversation with a long absent friend. It expands the Bourdain industrial complex. It’s different but familiar. If the objective is finding an answer to all the questions leading up to Bourdain’s death, of course it fails because explaining why a person takes their own life is an impossible task. But the book does succeed in showing us a more three-dimensional person, and for many fans who convinced themselves Anthony Bourdain lived an ideal life, these interviews illustrate faults many may not have realized he possessed.