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The Twenty-Seventh City
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
About the author
Jonathan Franzen
79 books9,442 followersJonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion; and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by FSG. His fourth novel, Freedom, was published in the fall of 2010.
Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (1996), the Salon Book Award (2001), the New York Times Best Books of the Year (2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2002).
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonath...
Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (1996), the Salon Book Award (2001), the New York Times Best Books of the Year (2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2002).
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonath...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 496 reviews
May 23, 2022
During the decades after the American Civil War St. Louis grew to become America's 4th largest city, by the 1980s it was the 27th! Jonathan Franzen's monster of a debut takes the appointment of one-time Bombay police chief, the American born S Jammu, as Chief of Police of the St. Louis County as the opening bow of a extremely detailed, darkly satirical and very well written county and city wide conspiracy that has huge ramifications for many of those involved especially the main protagonist, a mostly apolitical property magnate. Frantzen's use of a real American city but completely fictional characters and events is pretty daring and he pulls it off with aplomb.
The downside for me was that although a compelling narrative, it just didn't seem to mean anything or should I say, say anything? Critically it was seen as a fine literary work where Franzen creates a whirlwind political and wider conspiracy to ruin and debase the American Dream with darkly comedic satire; but their lies my problem with it, what American Dream, the city had been spiralling downward for decades! I'd just call it a very well written and conceived thriller, with a whole lot of scrumptious and innovative detail and characters, with a plot that just won't quit! Despite its length (small type, 500+ pages) it's absolutely worth a read, being such a well thought out and daring (to a degree) debut. 7 out of 12.
2022 read
The downside for me was that although a compelling narrative, it just didn't seem to mean anything or should I say, say anything? Critically it was seen as a fine literary work where Franzen creates a whirlwind political and wider conspiracy to ruin and debase the American Dream with darkly comedic satire; but their lies my problem with it, what American Dream, the city had been spiralling downward for decades! I'd just call it a very well written and conceived thriller, with a whole lot of scrumptious and innovative detail and characters, with a plot that just won't quit! Despite its length (small type, 500+ pages) it's absolutely worth a read, being such a well thought out and daring (to a degree) debut. 7 out of 12.
2022 read
June 17, 2019
In the running for one of the worst books I've ever read. When I think of the hours I wasted on this, I want to cry rage-tears.
One week later...
It took me a while to fully understand why I loathed this book. Finally, after a weekend camping with friends and their families and their friends and their families, I understood: it lacks any generosity of spirit. It does not enjoy its own characters, nor their stories, nor this twenty-seventh city where they live and die, St. Louis.
My weekend was like many other such trips: full of people I loved, liked, didn't know, was annoyed by; kids running around screaming and laughing; political diatribes and mellow conversations about fishing and supportive affirmations and passive-aggressive put-downs and gossiping and storytelling and one-upmanship and bonding on both superficial and deep levels. It was a slice of life featuring many sorts of people, much like many other slices of life where people come together who are similar and disparate. It was a human experience, quite unlike this book.
On the face of it, this is a book that I'd like. It is a thick, dense slice of life combined with a nihilistic, often absurdist political thriller. I like the immersive experiences; I like a certain degree of cynicism about human nature; I like books that live just a little off to the side from actual reality. But it fails on all of those fronts. My book this weekend was one by Vonnegut; this book lacks that master's necessary lightness of touch when it comes to unreal scenarios and farcical behavior. Vonnegut's absurdist style feels like a soft, teasing breeze; this book is a depressing, inexplicable downpour out of nowhere. A bleak outlook on how humans engage with each other can be exhilarating when the tale told is an airtight trap or a mordant dose of horror. But this book offers up nihilistic takes on human nature across such a wide canvas, within such a loose, sloppy narrative, that any points made are inevitably lost within the gassy bloat of it all. It feels like the nihilism of a young person who is precocious and certainly knows the importance of such basic things as research and three-dimensional characterization, but who knows very little about actual life. Juvenile, poorly-earned nihilism. Worst of all, the "slice of life" that is much of this book was impossible for me to enjoy. It punishes its characters; it degrades them... for what reason, to what end? What kind of slice of life shows life to solely be a game of assholes trying to dominate - or ignore - other assholes? Was this Franzen's whole take on human nature? This is not a slice of any real life that I'm aware of; rather, it is a slice of callow, masturbatory nonsense that is jerking off to its own supposed cleverness. A book that doesn't really understand nor even particularly care for its characters is not a book worth spending any amount of time on.
And that diatribe above doesn't even mention its repulsive engagement with race (e.g. why exactly do all of the manipulative, murderous invaders have to be from India - what's the point there, just because? e.g. why do Franzen's black characters make me think that the author didn't actually know any black people prior to writing this?) or its repugnant handling of its female characters (e.g. it saves its most heartless, most nauseating ending for its most admirable female character; e.g. it lets its ruthless female villain's potentially fatal flaw be her unspoken longing for the touch of a man) or its cluelessness about how to construct a compelling narrative (e.g. after a brutal kidnapping is depicted, Franzen decides its time to spend a dozen or so pages on a debate between power brokers over real estate speculation - as if that kidnapping of a major character is just another narrative turn in a book full of such turns) or its ignorance of how depth of characterization should be achieved (e.g. why would a reader care about endless backstory in the last quarter for characters shown to be worthless pieces of shit throughout the preceding 400 pages? did the author not realize that understanding his villains' motivations first would have made them less of an obnoxious trial to read about?) or or or...
That goddamn BLOAT. This huge book is like a compendium of amateurish missteps made by an author of undeniable talent, even brilliance. It impressed many upon its release, back in 1988. That's not surprising; people are often fooled by talent, by cleverness. Even when there is a hollow at the core, where the heart should be.
One week later...
It took me a while to fully understand why I loathed this book. Finally, after a weekend camping with friends and their families and their friends and their families, I understood: it lacks any generosity of spirit. It does not enjoy its own characters, nor their stories, nor this twenty-seventh city where they live and die, St. Louis.
My weekend was like many other such trips: full of people I loved, liked, didn't know, was annoyed by; kids running around screaming and laughing; political diatribes and mellow conversations about fishing and supportive affirmations and passive-aggressive put-downs and gossiping and storytelling and one-upmanship and bonding on both superficial and deep levels. It was a slice of life featuring many sorts of people, much like many other slices of life where people come together who are similar and disparate. It was a human experience, quite unlike this book.
On the face of it, this is a book that I'd like. It is a thick, dense slice of life combined with a nihilistic, often absurdist political thriller. I like the immersive experiences; I like a certain degree of cynicism about human nature; I like books that live just a little off to the side from actual reality. But it fails on all of those fronts. My book this weekend was one by Vonnegut; this book lacks that master's necessary lightness of touch when it comes to unreal scenarios and farcical behavior. Vonnegut's absurdist style feels like a soft, teasing breeze; this book is a depressing, inexplicable downpour out of nowhere. A bleak outlook on how humans engage with each other can be exhilarating when the tale told is an airtight trap or a mordant dose of horror. But this book offers up nihilistic takes on human nature across such a wide canvas, within such a loose, sloppy narrative, that any points made are inevitably lost within the gassy bloat of it all. It feels like the nihilism of a young person who is precocious and certainly knows the importance of such basic things as research and three-dimensional characterization, but who knows very little about actual life. Juvenile, poorly-earned nihilism. Worst of all, the "slice of life" that is much of this book was impossible for me to enjoy. It punishes its characters; it degrades them... for what reason, to what end? What kind of slice of life shows life to solely be a game of assholes trying to dominate - or ignore - other assholes? Was this Franzen's whole take on human nature? This is not a slice of any real life that I'm aware of; rather, it is a slice of callow, masturbatory nonsense that is jerking off to its own supposed cleverness. A book that doesn't really understand nor even particularly care for its characters is not a book worth spending any amount of time on.
And that diatribe above doesn't even mention its repulsive engagement with race (e.g. why exactly do all of the manipulative, murderous invaders have to be from India - what's the point there, just because? e.g. why do Franzen's black characters make me think that the author didn't actually know any black people prior to writing this?) or its repugnant handling of its female characters (e.g. it saves its most heartless, most nauseating ending for its most admirable female character; e.g. it lets its ruthless female villain's potentially fatal flaw be her unspoken longing for the touch of a man) or its cluelessness about how to construct a compelling narrative (e.g. after a brutal kidnapping is depicted, Franzen decides its time to spend a dozen or so pages on a debate between power brokers over real estate speculation - as if that kidnapping of a major character is just another narrative turn in a book full of such turns) or its ignorance of how depth of characterization should be achieved (e.g. why would a reader care about endless backstory in the last quarter for characters shown to be worthless pieces of shit throughout the preceding 400 pages? did the author not realize that understanding his villains' motivations first would have made them less of an obnoxious trial to read about?) or or or...
That goddamn BLOAT. This huge book is like a compendium of amateurish missteps made by an author of undeniable talent, even brilliance. It impressed many upon its release, back in 1988. That's not surprising; people are often fooled by talent, by cleverness. Even when there is a hollow at the core, where the heart should be.
August 7, 2020
”His face was sifting through her hair, seeking skin. She twisted around in his arm and let him kiss her throat. Over his slicked-back hair she saw the hotel room’s ‘luxurious’ bedspread, its ‘contemporary’ art print, the ‘distinctive’ roughcast ceiling. He unbuttoned the top of her blouse, snorting intermittently. Probably the best metaphor for the State was sexual obsession. An absorbing parallel world, a clandestine organizing principle. Men moved mountains for the sake of a few muscle contractions in the dark.”
S. Jammu is a high flyer, a woman so nakedly ambitious that, even when she isn’t inspiring a few muscle contractions in the dark, she is dripping with confidence and competence. She rose through the police ranks quickly in India, and when the opportunity arises to take a job as the St. Louis chief of police, she realizes the New World is hers to conquer.
This isn’t just a young, Indian woman coming to Missouri to take a job. Her whole network comes with her. The things she learned that helped her succeed in India will prove equally effective in the Gateway to the West. She has a wealthy mother who is connected to the very highest levels of power. A tsunami of real estate money floods the streets of St. Louis right under the noses of the powerful elite who run the city. Foremost of these men is Martin Probst, who was instrumental in building the Arch. His reputation is impeccable, and Jammu’s network soon hones in on him as the man who can turn dissenters into supporters. They target his daughter, and when she proves elusive for seduction, they turn to his wife Barbara. Destabilize the marriage and then Jammu will do the rest.
Probst is naive in the face of ambition. He has drifted in a bubble of irreproachability for a long time now. What do you do once you’ve built an Arch? His life’s work is really already done. Everything going forward will pale in comparison. A man seemingly devoid of sexual passions will soon find himself consumed with desire that may marginalize or even destroy him.
The politics in this novel are fascinating to see unfold. We discover the numerous strings that are tied to Jammu and the ponderous grinding of the St. Louis political machine, that is trying to catch up with an agile enemy that it doesn’t even see as an enemy. I actually found myself unnerved by the lack of morality, the emigrant who is more capitalist than the rat bastard American businessmen, and the unquenchable greed. I feared Jammu because I could see how easily someone like this can fool people for too long. Success is rarely questioned in the charismatic, the beautiful, and the determined. The dirty dealings behind the gorgeous facade are too rarely exposed.
This is a very ambitious first book. The prose already shows the promise of what we will see in future Jonathan Franzen books. The plot is monstrous, and human behavior is cast as bleak as the darkest Shakespearean play. The novel does bog down in the middle. Some kindling needed to be thrown on the cooling bonfire. Despite the traffic jam in the midway part, I still managed to finish this book in two days, driven by a desire to see if the young Franzen could actually pull this all together. There are loose strings that other reviewers complain about, but I always feel that life is messy and good novels should reflect that as well. I am surprised that he wasn’t subjected to a deeper editing, but his editors must have recognized the promise he was showing and chose not to rob him of his voice.
Franzen was 29 when it was published, but if you look at his picture on the back cover, you’d swear he was still peering in the bathroom mirror looking in vain for the first bristles. I’m planning to read his second novel, Strong Motion, very soon. I’ve ignored the early Franzen novels for too long.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/
S. Jammu is a high flyer, a woman so nakedly ambitious that, even when she isn’t inspiring a few muscle contractions in the dark, she is dripping with confidence and competence. She rose through the police ranks quickly in India, and when the opportunity arises to take a job as the St. Louis chief of police, she realizes the New World is hers to conquer.
This isn’t just a young, Indian woman coming to Missouri to take a job. Her whole network comes with her. The things she learned that helped her succeed in India will prove equally effective in the Gateway to the West. She has a wealthy mother who is connected to the very highest levels of power. A tsunami of real estate money floods the streets of St. Louis right under the noses of the powerful elite who run the city. Foremost of these men is Martin Probst, who was instrumental in building the Arch. His reputation is impeccable, and Jammu’s network soon hones in on him as the man who can turn dissenters into supporters. They target his daughter, and when she proves elusive for seduction, they turn to his wife Barbara. Destabilize the marriage and then Jammu will do the rest.
Probst is naive in the face of ambition. He has drifted in a bubble of irreproachability for a long time now. What do you do once you’ve built an Arch? His life’s work is really already done. Everything going forward will pale in comparison. A man seemingly devoid of sexual passions will soon find himself consumed with desire that may marginalize or even destroy him.
The politics in this novel are fascinating to see unfold. We discover the numerous strings that are tied to Jammu and the ponderous grinding of the St. Louis political machine, that is trying to catch up with an agile enemy that it doesn’t even see as an enemy. I actually found myself unnerved by the lack of morality, the emigrant who is more capitalist than the rat bastard American businessmen, and the unquenchable greed. I feared Jammu because I could see how easily someone like this can fool people for too long. Success is rarely questioned in the charismatic, the beautiful, and the determined. The dirty dealings behind the gorgeous facade are too rarely exposed.
This is a very ambitious first book. The prose already shows the promise of what we will see in future Jonathan Franzen books. The plot is monstrous, and human behavior is cast as bleak as the darkest Shakespearean play. The novel does bog down in the middle. Some kindling needed to be thrown on the cooling bonfire. Despite the traffic jam in the midway part, I still managed to finish this book in two days, driven by a desire to see if the young Franzen could actually pull this all together. There are loose strings that other reviewers complain about, but I always feel that life is messy and good novels should reflect that as well. I am surprised that he wasn’t subjected to a deeper editing, but his editors must have recognized the promise he was showing and chose not to rob him of his voice.
Franzen was 29 when it was published, but if you look at his picture on the back cover, you’d swear he was still peering in the bathroom mirror looking in vain for the first bristles. I’m planning to read his second novel, Strong Motion, very soon. I’ve ignored the early Franzen novels for too long.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/
August 31, 2014
This is a big weird book, and the first novel I've been able to get into after a depressing reading rut. For some reason every reviewer on here seems to have hated or at least been disappointed by this book, but I thought it was a fun and unexpectedly bizarre read. Sure, it sagged a bit in the middle, but what 500 page book doesn't? I really haven't been able to get into any fiction in ages, and I wolfed this thing down in three days, looked forward to picking it up when I had to put it down and everything, which I'm grateful for because whenever that stops happening I'm scared that I've just stopped liking books.
The Twenty-Seventh City takes place in mid-eighties St. Louis, which has been infiltrated by a nefarious Indian police chief bent on evil conspiracy for obscure and convoluted reasons. Its plot mostly concerns said conspiracy and its impact on various members of the St. Louis economic elite. I can't say that it all made a lot of sense to me or that it was a perfect book by any means, but I found it very engaging, in part because I didn't understand the basic premise (nefarious Indian police chief...?) and was dying to know what the fuck was going on.
Franzen is one of those writers who seems to know a lot (or at least enough) about a lot of things, which I generally find fun, though this book does include some pretty tiresome play-by-plays of various sporting events, and I was soooo relieved when he seemed to forget about his boring birdwatching shtick a quarter of the way through. Other people on here complained that there were too many characters, but all the important ones were distinct and compelling enough to keep straight and maintain my interest. Some of the little writerly experiments (e.g. lapsing into present tense, creating unnecessary suspense and confusion by holding back key information about what was happening and to whom in a scene) were annoying, but on the whole the prose was super solid and did have some especially nice moments and good descriptions.
I think there are some pretty interesting flaws in this novel, such as its tepid, nervous effort to deal with racial themes directly. My impression of this must be influenced by reading this sixteen years after its publication and in the shadow of recent news out of Ferguson, but the black characters in the book are sort of weirdly there-but-not, which is especially odd considering how significant the black community is to many of the book's major events. I felt like this elision was sort of intentional, but it was kind of a craven sort of intentionality, like Franzen wanted to engage with the racial stuff but didn't quite have the nerve.
Anyway, I have zero memory of The Corrections (aside from an image of a childhood friend's suburban living room and garage, for some reason...?), though I remember having liked it at the time, but I know I enjoyed this more than I did Freedom. I feel like I heard people complaining about Patty after Freedom and saying Franzen doesn't know how to write female characters, and I thought of that charge pretty often while reading this. I think it's very often bullshit when readers of either gender accuse writers of not being able to write the opposite gender. It's one thing to point out that certain male writers always make two-dimensional, lame women, because that's definitely true, but I don't think anyone in good faith could accuse Franzen of that. He does have a very specific type of female character, and it was interesting to see her represented (in a few different ways) in this book. Franzen's women are kind of fucked up and ruthless in a specific way that I don't think I've quite seen anywhere else. To me that doesn't mean that he doesn't "get" what being a woman is like, it's just that he's writing about very specific, certain kinds of people who might not actually exist anywhere else except inside his mind. And I don't think that really has that much to do with gender, or with some essentialist experience of what "being a woman" is really like. Maybe your experience of being a woman isn't like Patty Berglund's or like Barbara Probst's, but maybe he isn't trying to represent your experience, and maybe there are some other women out there who think these characters represent something real to them. Personally, I like seeing that in a writer's work -- a unique and defined view of what people and the world are like -- and I enjoyed The Twenty-Seventh City because I found Franzen's view compelling, or at least entertaining.
The Twenty-Seventh City takes place in mid-eighties St. Louis, which has been infiltrated by a nefarious Indian police chief bent on evil conspiracy for obscure and convoluted reasons. Its plot mostly concerns said conspiracy and its impact on various members of the St. Louis economic elite. I can't say that it all made a lot of sense to me or that it was a perfect book by any means, but I found it very engaging, in part because I didn't understand the basic premise (nefarious Indian police chief...?) and was dying to know what the fuck was going on.
Franzen is one of those writers who seems to know a lot (or at least enough) about a lot of things, which I generally find fun, though this book does include some pretty tiresome play-by-plays of various sporting events, and I was soooo relieved when he seemed to forget about his boring birdwatching shtick a quarter of the way through. Other people on here complained that there were too many characters, but all the important ones were distinct and compelling enough to keep straight and maintain my interest. Some of the little writerly experiments (e.g. lapsing into present tense, creating unnecessary suspense and confusion by holding back key information about what was happening and to whom in a scene) were annoying, but on the whole the prose was super solid and did have some especially nice moments and good descriptions.
I think there are some pretty interesting flaws in this novel, such as its tepid, nervous effort to deal with racial themes directly. My impression of this must be influenced by reading this sixteen years after its publication and in the shadow of recent news out of Ferguson, but the black characters in the book are sort of weirdly there-but-not, which is especially odd considering how significant the black community is to many of the book's major events. I felt like this elision was sort of intentional, but it was kind of a craven sort of intentionality, like Franzen wanted to engage with the racial stuff but didn't quite have the nerve.
Anyway, I have zero memory of The Corrections (aside from an image of a childhood friend's suburban living room and garage, for some reason...?), though I remember having liked it at the time, but I know I enjoyed this more than I did Freedom. I feel like I heard people complaining about Patty after Freedom and saying Franzen doesn't know how to write female characters, and I thought of that charge pretty often while reading this. I think it's very often bullshit when readers of either gender accuse writers of not being able to write the opposite gender. It's one thing to point out that certain male writers always make two-dimensional, lame women, because that's definitely true, but I don't think anyone in good faith could accuse Franzen of that. He does have a very specific type of female character, and it was interesting to see her represented (in a few different ways) in this book. Franzen's women are kind of fucked up and ruthless in a specific way that I don't think I've quite seen anywhere else. To me that doesn't mean that he doesn't "get" what being a woman is like, it's just that he's writing about very specific, certain kinds of people who might not actually exist anywhere else except inside his mind. And I don't think that really has that much to do with gender, or with some essentialist experience of what "being a woman" is really like. Maybe your experience of being a woman isn't like Patty Berglund's or like Barbara Probst's, but maybe he isn't trying to represent your experience, and maybe there are some other women out there who think these characters represent something real to them. Personally, I like seeing that in a writer's work -- a unique and defined view of what people and the world are like -- and I enjoyed The Twenty-Seventh City because I found Franzen's view compelling, or at least entertaining.
February 22, 2016
“The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone.
If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
Franzen's freshman effort is striking. First, just one long gaze at the picture of Franzen on the back and it makes me think this kid must have been gnawing on ideas for this book in his mother's womb. Seriously, he looks like he might be wearing the same deodorant his dad gave him at puberty.
Anyway, I was inspired to read this book because I was heading to St. Louis for a couple days and figured given the recent Ferguson-inspired race tensions, there might never be a more appropriate time to crack Franzen's novel about an Indian woman who takes over as the St. Louis chief of police. There is sex, violence, politics, intrigue, etc.. It is a thriller that aspires to be literary, or a thriller written by someone who is simply writing in the wrong genre.
The book is ambitious, messy (plot threads abandoned all over the place), inventive, cracked in places, but destined to stick around. I say that knowing that there are some serious Franzen haters out there. I also say that knowing this isn't his best work (by far). But in 1988, Franzen wrote a novel that seems to have almost perfectly captured the paranoid, xenophobic, social and race conflict that surrounds President Obama (birth certificate, etc). Imagine while reading this novel that Obama is Jammu and the United States is St. Louis and let the details slide from Ferguson to the Gateway Arch and there you are.
Franzen's fixation on the American family (both in its function and disfunction) is in pupae form here. Family dinners, tensions between spouses, extra-marital encounters, spoiled children, holiday tensions, they all germ here. His prose is great, if a bit uneven (brilliant in parts and boring in others). His plot is complicated. His setting masterful. Again, this isn't a masterpiece, but it was a clear indication of his future ambition and trajectory.
If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
Franzen's freshman effort is striking. First, just one long gaze at the picture of Franzen on the back and it makes me think this kid must have been gnawing on ideas for this book in his mother's womb. Seriously, he looks like he might be wearing the same deodorant his dad gave him at puberty.
Anyway, I was inspired to read this book because I was heading to St. Louis for a couple days and figured given the recent Ferguson-inspired race tensions, there might never be a more appropriate time to crack Franzen's novel about an Indian woman who takes over as the St. Louis chief of police. There is sex, violence, politics, intrigue, etc.. It is a thriller that aspires to be literary, or a thriller written by someone who is simply writing in the wrong genre.
The book is ambitious, messy (plot threads abandoned all over the place), inventive, cracked in places, but destined to stick around. I say that knowing that there are some serious Franzen haters out there. I also say that knowing this isn't his best work (by far). But in 1988, Franzen wrote a novel that seems to have almost perfectly captured the paranoid, xenophobic, social and race conflict that surrounds President Obama (birth certificate, etc). Imagine while reading this novel that Obama is Jammu and the United States is St. Louis and let the details slide from Ferguson to the Gateway Arch and there you are.
Franzen's fixation on the American family (both in its function and disfunction) is in pupae form here. Family dinners, tensions between spouses, extra-marital encounters, spoiled children, holiday tensions, they all germ here. His prose is great, if a bit uneven (brilliant in parts and boring in others). His plot is complicated. His setting masterful. Again, this isn't a masterpiece, but it was a clear indication of his future ambition and trajectory.
March 6, 2022
What follows is the intro to a (for now) abandoned attempt to a long piece on this novel that was based on some academic work (which can be found on my academia.edu page) that I had done on it. If you are on the fence about reading T27C, though, do consider clicking through to the Millions and LARB articles before making your decision!
When Jonathan Franzen's first novel The Twenty-Seventh City had its 25th anniversary re-issue back in September of 2013, it was almost as ignored as much as it was when it was first published in 1988. While Eric Lundgren in The Millions wrote a poignant and nostalgic reflection on the novel and its relationship to the city of St. Louis and Nina Martyris contributed an excellent piece on the novel's complex portrayal of the Indian-American experience in the LARB, Paurl Segal wrote in Slate of its many failings. And that, at least as far as I could tell, was pretty much that.
The 27C is definitely not without its faults, but it does a lot of things very well indeed, and if you are a fan of Don Delillo or Thomas Pynchon you will recognize their influence on the book, which attempts to 'unveil' certain previously hidden or unacknowledged economic and sociological aspects of our lives to us. And though critics such as James Wood would decry any such attempts to go beyond the 'proper' scope of the novel (i.e., the investigation of the 'soul' of the isolated individual) as what Wood called 'hysterical realism', Franzen's novel largely succeeds in its aim to get us to confront how our individuality is predicated and threatened by vectors of power and history. Lev Grossman, writing in Time Magazine, captures the ambitions of books like this superbly:
If you don't like these kinds of novels, don't read them. But if you do, this one will open you up to considering, among other things, the role that capitalism plays in your life while you aren't watching! Very few novels have attempted such a feat, and in this twenty-nine year old's first novel, we see many of the above characteristics deployed with the maturity of a much older writer.
Franzen's latest book, Purity won't attempt any such feats: he's long since changed his mind about the kinds of things that fiction ought to be doing. Oh, I'll read it, and probably enjoy it well enough, but it probably won't remain bubbling away in my veins long afterward the way The Twenty-Seventh City did—and does, to this day.
When Jonathan Franzen's first novel The Twenty-Seventh City had its 25th anniversary re-issue back in September of 2013, it was almost as ignored as much as it was when it was first published in 1988. While Eric Lundgren in The Millions wrote a poignant and nostalgic reflection on the novel and its relationship to the city of St. Louis and Nina Martyris contributed an excellent piece on the novel's complex portrayal of the Indian-American experience in the LARB, Paurl Segal wrote in Slate of its many failings. And that, at least as far as I could tell, was pretty much that.
The 27C is definitely not without its faults, but it does a lot of things very well indeed, and if you are a fan of Don Delillo or Thomas Pynchon you will recognize their influence on the book, which attempts to 'unveil' certain previously hidden or unacknowledged economic and sociological aspects of our lives to us. And though critics such as James Wood would decry any such attempts to go beyond the 'proper' scope of the novel (i.e., the investigation of the 'soul' of the isolated individual) as what Wood called 'hysterical realism', Franzen's novel largely succeeds in its aim to get us to confront how our individuality is predicated and threatened by vectors of power and history. Lev Grossman, writing in Time Magazine, captures the ambitions of books like this superbly:
What I see now when I look at books like White Teeth and Infinite Jest and Underworld is—among many other things—an attempt to gesture at the infinite, overabundant, overwhelming complexity of reality, and the increasing force with which that complexity is borne in upon us by means electronic and otherwise (i.e. by the overabundance of blogs like this one). Those books rarely end without a suggestion that they could have gone on and on indefinitely, because the world’s narrative resources are just that inexhaustible. You rarely meet a character, even a minor one, without getting the impression that the camera could wander off with them, instead of with whoever the hero of the moment is, and the result would be as rich and interesting a novel as the one the author actually wrote. You can imagine those books as endlessly ramifying trees of story, their branches dividing and dividing until the reader gets the point, which is that they could branch and divide forever and still not capture the full complexity of the world around them.
If you don't like these kinds of novels, don't read them. But if you do, this one will open you up to considering, among other things, the role that capitalism plays in your life while you aren't watching! Very few novels have attempted such a feat, and in this twenty-nine year old's first novel, we see many of the above characteristics deployed with the maturity of a much older writer.
Franzen's latest book, Purity won't attempt any such feats: he's long since changed his mind about the kinds of things that fiction ought to be doing. Oh, I'll read it, and probably enjoy it well enough, but it probably won't remain bubbling away in my veins long afterward the way The Twenty-Seventh City did—and does, to this day.
August 3, 2008
Hmm. It's hard to say this, since Jonathan Franzen has more talent in writing than I will ever have even tying my shoes. But compared to "Strong Motion" and "The Corrections", this book is tiresome, and falls unmistakably short of its ambitions. There are some hints of his gift (on more consistent display in later works) for hyper-perceptive and realistic accounts of the moment-by-moment consciousness of his characters; if only his regard for his characters in this one were more evenly distributed. Also, later on he writes with more humor, too. But I do like the fact that the book tackles themes of public civic participation and terrorism in the form of serious fiction -- why should the pulpy mystery novels have all the fun? Also, the hunting scene (esp. pp. 161-162) was masterful. Again, you could probably convince someone this was Don Delillo if you didn't show them the cover.
. . . . .
The fact that he's written only a few things so far gives me the rare chance to say I have read the entire ouevre of an author I like, once I get through this one. But I have to say, I have more fun reading this if I think of it not as early Franzen, but as bootleg Delillo.
. . . . .
The fact that he's written only a few things so far gives me the rare chance to say I have read the entire ouevre of an author I like, once I get through this one. But I have to say, I have more fun reading this if I think of it not as early Franzen, but as bootleg Delillo.
February 10, 2017
Featured in my Top 5 Jonathan Franzen Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKJrZ...
Video-review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68qnEs...
An incredible debut novel, a wonderfully Pynchonian work, and proof that Franzen can be awesome even with something different from the Midwestern Family Saga.
Video-review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68qnEs...
An incredible debut novel, a wonderfully Pynchonian work, and proof that Franzen can be awesome even with something different from the Midwestern Family Saga.
December 8, 2010
Hey, uh, Jonathan, I'd like my week back. That week I spent reading this piece of you-know-what? I know, I know, I read you backwards. Totally my mistake. I started with The Corrections several years ago, which I dearly loved. Then I read Strong Motion, which wasn't nearly as satisfying, but was still a worthwhile read. And now this. I stuck with this one to the very end because Strong Motion redeemed itself only in its latter pages. I kept thinking, okay, Jonathan, tie up a few of those loose ends. Make someone act humanely, decently, believably. But, uh, that never happened. So I spent an entire week of my life reading about horrible people doing horrible things to each other.
I get that misunderstandings and miscommunication are your trademarks, and you have used those to great effect in your other works. But here we have a dysfunctional family in the midst of a city run by evil corporate interests, policed by a department that is headed up and infiltrated by leftist Indian terrorists, who are spied upon by a cartoonish racist general. Next time, pick one or two evils. This form of absurdity only works when you have some kind of "everyman" you can actually relate to in order to find the experience at all palatable.
What I guess I find most unbelievable of all is the high praise this book received from professional reviewers. I can only assume that they were most impressed by the actual writing - the careful details and the elaborate plotting, maybe. But surely not the characters. I mean, what happened to you? Does everybody in your life hate everybody else? Could an entire city truly be populated by people who at every level of personal and civic involvement just want to use others to further their own ends? Does no one in your world have any emotional connection with other humans? The kind of connection that requires a little sacrifice or benefit of the doubt? Sometimes you came close, but inevitably you pulled them away again. I'm just not sure that works for an entire novel.
Oh, and please. Why on earth did you even try to write about those African American characters? Clearly your heart wasn't in it. Let's say you actually did understand something about their lives. You didn't know what to do with them, couldn't find any sort of real plot for them, and the whole thing came off as a pointless afterthought. Stick with what you know: middle class white folk.
I get that misunderstandings and miscommunication are your trademarks, and you have used those to great effect in your other works. But here we have a dysfunctional family in the midst of a city run by evil corporate interests, policed by a department that is headed up and infiltrated by leftist Indian terrorists, who are spied upon by a cartoonish racist general. Next time, pick one or two evils. This form of absurdity only works when you have some kind of "everyman" you can actually relate to in order to find the experience at all palatable.
What I guess I find most unbelievable of all is the high praise this book received from professional reviewers. I can only assume that they were most impressed by the actual writing - the careful details and the elaborate plotting, maybe. But surely not the characters. I mean, what happened to you? Does everybody in your life hate everybody else? Could an entire city truly be populated by people who at every level of personal and civic involvement just want to use others to further their own ends? Does no one in your world have any emotional connection with other humans? The kind of connection that requires a little sacrifice or benefit of the doubt? Sometimes you came close, but inevitably you pulled them away again. I'm just not sure that works for an entire novel.
Oh, and please. Why on earth did you even try to write about those African American characters? Clearly your heart wasn't in it. Let's say you actually did understand something about their lives. You didn't know what to do with them, couldn't find any sort of real plot for them, and the whole thing came off as a pointless afterthought. Stick with what you know: middle class white folk.
August 14, 2007
This book held a very intersting ballance between being a page-turning thriller and a slow-paced, almost boring novel of mid-city civics. Franzen's first novel, it should have replaced the map of St. Louis with a chart of characters, a la most Tolstoy translations; the geography never was quite as confusing as the fifty+ main characters, their relationships, and which corperations or city office they controlled.
The plot is oddly conservative, centering around a plot by foreign (Indian) investors to manipulate the realstate market of St. Louis. The only character who sees the truth is a crazy, anti-communist, anti-immigrant, racist former military man, who tries to rally a group of local buisiness men to resest the bewitching new female police chief. But this is Franzen, so I can't read too far into the political implications, as everyone ends up being basically unlikable yet sympathetic, so there is no one who really is "the hero" or "the villian," though by the end of the book you pity both the instigators of the plot and its victims.
"The Twenty-Seventh City" ended reading more like DeLillo that "The Corrections," mainly because of the combination between paranoid post-vietnam terrorist plot (see: The Players) and mid-life, middle-America angst (see: everything by DeLillo). Slow to start, the book eventually works itself up to a near thriller pace as the bizarre land-grab plot begins to involve planned terrorist attacks, kidnapings, and Soviet era brain-washing.
Good, but not required reading.
The plot is oddly conservative, centering around a plot by foreign (Indian) investors to manipulate the realstate market of St. Louis. The only character who sees the truth is a crazy, anti-communist, anti-immigrant, racist former military man, who tries to rally a group of local buisiness men to resest the bewitching new female police chief. But this is Franzen, so I can't read too far into the political implications, as everyone ends up being basically unlikable yet sympathetic, so there is no one who really is "the hero" or "the villian," though by the end of the book you pity both the instigators of the plot and its victims.
"The Twenty-Seventh City" ended reading more like DeLillo that "The Corrections," mainly because of the combination between paranoid post-vietnam terrorist plot (see: The Players) and mid-life, middle-America angst (see: everything by DeLillo). Slow to start, the book eventually works itself up to a near thriller pace as the bizarre land-grab plot begins to involve planned terrorist attacks, kidnapings, and Soviet era brain-washing.
Good, but not required reading.
Read
November 3, 2011Let's talk about the comparisons between two of my favorite writers of the present era, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. Both write great, sprawling novels that, while epically long, aren't very difficult. Both express the unique anxieties and lonelinesses of our present era, and will both probably be remembered by future scholars as representative writers of our times. But in both cases, their first novels were really pretty weak. The Broom of the System feels like a young writer's rather weak attempts to engage with Pynchon and followers. And guess what, The 27th City does too.
But let's be clear. There are still a great many moments in the book that are really gorgeous. Franzen is beginning to touch on the themes he would later hit on-- the decline of the American dream, family issues, conspiracy, etc. But rather than focusing on a few beautifully realized characters, he goes for the Ben Hur cast-of-thousands thing, which honestly is just confusing. Martin Probst, one of our (more) central characters could probably fit fairly well into a later Franzen novel, but most everyone else is little more than a shadow dancing across the page. If you're a Franzen fan already, you might wanna read it just to get a good idea of the writer's arc, but otherwise, stick to Freedom or The Corrections.
But let's be clear. There are still a great many moments in the book that are really gorgeous. Franzen is beginning to touch on the themes he would later hit on-- the decline of the American dream, family issues, conspiracy, etc. But rather than focusing on a few beautifully realized characters, he goes for the Ben Hur cast-of-thousands thing, which honestly is just confusing. Martin Probst, one of our (more) central characters could probably fit fairly well into a later Franzen novel, but most everyone else is little more than a shadow dancing across the page. If you're a Franzen fan already, you might wanna read it just to get a good idea of the writer's arc, but otherwise, stick to Freedom or The Corrections.
July 28, 2011
There should be a symbol for 'hated it.' One of the worst books I have ever read. Pretentious, agonizing, worthless, populated with extremely boring characters (in my opinion). What is it about? Some uninteresting combination of St Louis, Indian nationals, immigration and terrorism, a metaphorical story about metaphors, and Jonathan Franzen's love for his own vocabulary (or his thesaurus). I was actually angry at myself for finishing it, the Bataan Death March of books. If I ever read another Jonathan Franzen book, it will mean I've been body-snatched.
January 2, 2013
Fake review: How can someone so obviously intelligent be a mere transcriber of platitudes? (quote from the book, btw). Real review: One of the trademarks of Franzen´s writing is the aftertaste of cynicism readily apparent in every one of his rather brilliant psychological insights. So it is hard for the reader not to treat his work with a similair level of hypercriticism.
Like how the friend who makes you laugh the most isn´t neccesarily going to be a great stand up comedian, so every man or woman with some insight and a quick pen doesn´t make a novelist. Since maybe the sixties we have many intelligent imposters running round disguised as novelists. Franzen has a natural skill at the Novel, the one of the 1800s. Another metaphor for ya: all classical music is called classical, yet that is really a way of deferring to Mozart, choosing him as the defintive artist in the whole history of the so called classical genre. The same is true of the Novel. That 18th century kind isn´t the only form (and thank god) but it was the peak of a certain type of skill set, one that people rarely have a even a rudimentary form of now (hear anybody lately with a Mozartian skill at melody lately?). Well, Franzen, even this first book, shows the skills of a Tolstoy or a Eliot. Not saying he´s as briliant (he isn´t) but he´s got that elusive, much cherished skill set. Also, at the same time, he can write one hell of a page turner. This book, focused on city politics, has an incredibly boring plot in theory. It almost seems like Franz choose the most boring plot possible to see if could make it interesting. For the most part, he suceeds. The labyrinthine journey through the city politics of St. Louis (ugh, i know) is pretty interesting. This book, being a first novel, is full of mistakes. I think he tried too hard to put everything he knew into one book. And the book really doesn´t have to be as long as it is. Franzen obviously hadn´t found his voice yet. He uses pomo tricks, the kind of which are used as a buffer to emotion. He doesn´t do them any better or worse than anyone else, they just fit him worse considering how naked he can write human emotion and motivation. But the fact that he hadn´t found his voice yet actually works as a strength. The smug self assurence and hyper craft of Freedom is nowhere to be found. In its place you find a youthful enthusiam that is f´ing refreshing. Freedom felt like the work of a bitter, bitter man. This is the work of someone still enough in the thick of life to, if not know it more, feel it more.
An underrated, overlooked book, but overlooked for perhaps a fair reason.
Like how the friend who makes you laugh the most isn´t neccesarily going to be a great stand up comedian, so every man or woman with some insight and a quick pen doesn´t make a novelist. Since maybe the sixties we have many intelligent imposters running round disguised as novelists. Franzen has a natural skill at the Novel, the one of the 1800s. Another metaphor for ya: all classical music is called classical, yet that is really a way of deferring to Mozart, choosing him as the defintive artist in the whole history of the so called classical genre. The same is true of the Novel. That 18th century kind isn´t the only form (and thank god) but it was the peak of a certain type of skill set, one that people rarely have a even a rudimentary form of now (hear anybody lately with a Mozartian skill at melody lately?). Well, Franzen, even this first book, shows the skills of a Tolstoy or a Eliot. Not saying he´s as briliant (he isn´t) but he´s got that elusive, much cherished skill set. Also, at the same time, he can write one hell of a page turner. This book, focused on city politics, has an incredibly boring plot in theory. It almost seems like Franz choose the most boring plot possible to see if could make it interesting. For the most part, he suceeds. The labyrinthine journey through the city politics of St. Louis (ugh, i know) is pretty interesting. This book, being a first novel, is full of mistakes. I think he tried too hard to put everything he knew into one book. And the book really doesn´t have to be as long as it is. Franzen obviously hadn´t found his voice yet. He uses pomo tricks, the kind of which are used as a buffer to emotion. He doesn´t do them any better or worse than anyone else, they just fit him worse considering how naked he can write human emotion and motivation. But the fact that he hadn´t found his voice yet actually works as a strength. The smug self assurence and hyper craft of Freedom is nowhere to be found. In its place you find a youthful enthusiam that is f´ing refreshing. Freedom felt like the work of a bitter, bitter man. This is the work of someone still enough in the thick of life to, if not know it more, feel it more.
An underrated, overlooked book, but overlooked for perhaps a fair reason.
October 1, 2019
Azért az lenyűgöző, hogy az olyan technikai elemeket, amiket egy átlag író egy életen át tanul, Franzen mintha csak a kisujjából rázná ki: ebben a nagyregényben a leírások pontossága és szellemessége, valamint a párbeszédek életszagúsága* arra utal, hogy egy vérbeli profival van dolgunk, aki már a debütálásakor teljes fegyverzetben pattan elénk. Amitől viszont kevésbé vagyok lenyűgözve, az maga a történet.
Franzen a lejtmenetbe kerülő St. Louis krónikáját írja meg, ahol hirtelen rejtélyes indiaiak jelennek meg és felettébb piszkos, és legalább ennyire kacifántos politikai machinációkba kezdenek – semmitől sem riadnak vissza, hogy véghez vigyenek valami szörnyűséget, amit le sem merek írni, egyrészt a spoilerezés tilalma miatt, másrészt mert magam sem tudom, mi a fenét akarnak igazából. Ez a vonal bizonyos elemeiben hiteltelen, és úgy általában túl van írva, cserébe viszont elnyomja a regény összes többi, amúgy kifejezetten ígéretes mellékszálát. Őszintén szólva abban sem vagyok biztos, hogy mit akart vele üzenni az író. Az biztos, hogy az amerikai demokrácia kritikájaként mértékkel olvasható – legfeljebb az amerikai demokrácia önvédelmi képességének kritikájaként. Ugyanis azzal, hogy a fehérgalléros bűnözés mocskát Franzen kiszervezi mindenféle ravasz bevándorlókra, pont az élét veszi el a mondanivalónak: meghagyja ugyanis a lehetőséget az amerikai olvasónak, hogy azt higgye, nem ő maga, hanem mások (a „nem-amerikaiak”) jelentenek veszélyt a rendszerre. (Hogy szerencsétlen indiai olvasók mit szólnak ehhez az egészhez, abba meg bele sem merek gondolni.)
Mindent egybevetve azért nagyszerű, nyugtalanító rémmese ez egy sötét dimenzióból, és ha figyelembe veszem, hogy első regényről van szó, kénytelen vagyok leborulni a Franzen által használt technikai apparátus előtt. Ám annak azért nagyon örülök, hogy későbbi nagyepikus prózájában a szerző megtanulta elengedni a nagy, zűrzavaros sztorikat, és helyette átadta a helyet a kisebb történeteknek, amiket a szereplők közötti kapcsolat tölt meg dinamikával, és nem valami Frei Tamáshoz illő démoni összeesküvés.
* Párbeszédekről jut eszembe. Csak nekem tűnik úgy, hogy a magyar kortárs irodalom feltűnően kevés életszagú párbeszédet produkált az utóbbi néhány tíz évben? A legtöbb szerzőnk intelligensen hanyagolja is a dialógusok eszközét, aki pedig használja – mint legújabban Jászberényi –, az úgy beszélteti szereplőit, mintha azok tudtában lennének, hogy be vannak kamerázva. Az persze igaz, hogy minden irodalmi szereplő be van kamerázva (úgy hívják a kamerát, hogy író), de valahogy a lényege sérül a dolognak, ha erről értesülve vannak.
Franzen a lejtmenetbe kerülő St. Louis krónikáját írja meg, ahol hirtelen rejtélyes indiaiak jelennek meg és felettébb piszkos, és legalább ennyire kacifántos politikai machinációkba kezdenek – semmitől sem riadnak vissza, hogy véghez vigyenek valami szörnyűséget, amit le sem merek írni, egyrészt a spoilerezés tilalma miatt, másrészt mert magam sem tudom, mi a fenét akarnak igazából. Ez a vonal bizonyos elemeiben hiteltelen, és úgy általában túl van írva, cserébe viszont elnyomja a regény összes többi, amúgy kifejezetten ígéretes mellékszálát. Őszintén szólva abban sem vagyok biztos, hogy mit akart vele üzenni az író. Az biztos, hogy az amerikai demokrácia kritikájaként mértékkel olvasható – legfeljebb az amerikai demokrácia önvédelmi képességének kritikájaként. Ugyanis azzal, hogy a fehérgalléros bűnözés mocskát Franzen kiszervezi mindenféle ravasz bevándorlókra, pont az élét veszi el a mondanivalónak: meghagyja ugyanis a lehetőséget az amerikai olvasónak, hogy azt higgye, nem ő maga, hanem mások (a „nem-amerikaiak”) jelentenek veszélyt a rendszerre. (Hogy szerencsétlen indiai olvasók mit szólnak ehhez az egészhez, abba meg bele sem merek gondolni.)
Mindent egybevetve azért nagyszerű, nyugtalanító rémmese ez egy sötét dimenzióból, és ha figyelembe veszem, hogy első regényről van szó, kénytelen vagyok leborulni a Franzen által használt technikai apparátus előtt. Ám annak azért nagyon örülök, hogy későbbi nagyepikus prózájában a szerző megtanulta elengedni a nagy, zűrzavaros sztorikat, és helyette átadta a helyet a kisebb történeteknek, amiket a szereplők közötti kapcsolat tölt meg dinamikával, és nem valami Frei Tamáshoz illő démoni összeesküvés.
* Párbeszédekről jut eszembe. Csak nekem tűnik úgy, hogy a magyar kortárs irodalom feltűnően kevés életszagú párbeszédet produkált az utóbbi néhány tíz évben? A legtöbb szerzőnk intelligensen hanyagolja is a dialógusok eszközét, aki pedig használja – mint legújabban Jászberényi –, az úgy beszélteti szereplőit, mintha azok tudtában lennének, hogy be vannak kamerázva. Az persze igaz, hogy minden irodalmi szereplő be van kamerázva (úgy hívják a kamerát, hogy író), de valahogy a lényege sérül a dolognak, ha erről értesülve vannak.
Read
November 26, 2021Interesantno mi je što se nekako dogodilo da sam Frenzenove knjige čitao obrnutim redom od vremena objavljivanja. Prvo sam pročitao Pjuriti, pa Slobodu, zatim Korekcije i tek na kraju 27. grad, knjigu koju je Frenzen prvu napisao.
Prijateljica mi je već skrenula pažnju da je 27. Grad najslabija Frenzenova knjiga. I zaista. (mada je i takva daleko bolja od bilo čega što je Dona Tart ikada napisala)
Ne znam šta da kažem o ovoj knjizi. Frenzen je počeo da je piše, Orvelove, 1984. godine, a objavio je četiri godine docnije. Radnju je smestio u pomalo imaginarni Sent Luis tog doba. Zanimljivo mi je što je glavna negativka… negativka. Žena. Pa još indijskog porekla. To sada ne bi prošlo. Zanimljivo je i što je Frenzen u ovoj knjizi pisao i o HIV-u (istina, ne pod tim imenom, već kao o nekom novom gripu, od koga pate mahom prostitutke). A to je bilo doba kada smo tek počeli da shvatamo da postoji ovaj virus.
Definitivno su mi i dalje najbolje Frenzenove Korekcija i Sloboda (možda baš tim redom), a 27. grad ostaje značajan kao prvenac jednog velikog američkog pisca (kome je, koliko sam shvatio, najveća mana što nema nalog na Tviteru).
Pre nekoliko nedelja sam naleteo na jedan zanimljiv i, čini mi se, objektivan članak koji se bavi likom i delom ovog pisca. Preporučujem da ga pročitate. Kao i Frenzenove knjige.
http://www.glif.rs/blog/dzonatan-fren...
Prijateljica mi je već skrenula pažnju da je 27. Grad najslabija Frenzenova knjiga. I zaista. (mada je i takva daleko bolja od bilo čega što je Dona Tart ikada napisala)
Ne znam šta da kažem o ovoj knjizi. Frenzen je počeo da je piše, Orvelove, 1984. godine, a objavio je četiri godine docnije. Radnju je smestio u pomalo imaginarni Sent Luis tog doba. Zanimljivo mi je što je glavna negativka… negativka. Žena. Pa još indijskog porekla. To sada ne bi prošlo. Zanimljivo je i što je Frenzen u ovoj knjizi pisao i o HIV-u (istina, ne pod tim imenom, već kao o nekom novom gripu, od koga pate mahom prostitutke). A to je bilo doba kada smo tek počeli da shvatamo da postoji ovaj virus.
Definitivno su mi i dalje najbolje Frenzenove Korekcija i Sloboda (možda baš tim redom), a 27. grad ostaje značajan kao prvenac jednog velikog američkog pisca (kome je, koliko sam shvatio, najveća mana što nema nalog na Tviteru).
Pre nekoliko nedelja sam naleteo na jedan zanimljiv i, čini mi se, objektivan članak koji se bavi likom i delom ovog pisca. Preporučujem da ga pročitate. Kao i Frenzenove knjige.
http://www.glif.rs/blog/dzonatan-fren...
October 26, 2017
Scathing take on St. Louis—all the digs that were relevant 20+ years ago still are, sadly. But I loved that aspect of the book. Everything else? Uh...sentence-by-sentence, it's great. It's Franzen—the prose is good. But the story...idk. The brown people in the book are either terrorists or speak in pretty flimsy ebonics. Just felt a little icky. And the plane-flying-through-the-arch (Spoiler! Like you were going to read this anyway...) was laughable. BUT. Franzen himself has acknowledged how much the book doesn't hold up. Obviously he's done much, much better work since he wrote this. He was in his mid-20s! I'm in my mid-20s. I'm not published. So.
Anyway—read The Corrections. Read Freedom. Read Purity. Read the nonfiction. Skip this one.
Anyway—read The Corrections. Read Freedom. Read Purity. Read the nonfiction. Skip this one.
January 21, 2008
OK, if this book didn't contain so many references to Webster Groves I wouldn't have found it that great. "The Twenty-Seventh" city is a reference to St Louis and the plot is a bizarre takeover plot by Indian nationals. The identities of area notables and bigwigs are, by intent, not so carefully disguised and playing the game of "who's who" is fun. Find the place where Franzen goofs and calls Civic Progress by its real name, rather than the euphemistic title he gives it in the book (which has since slipped my mind).
March 20, 2021
So my official rating is 3.5 for this, but only because it was deceptively long and felt kinda drawn out parts. Really cool political drama but on a city scale (rather than just another Washington White House one), and it’s being St. Louis is pretty cool since it’s familiar + similar in size to Memphis. Definitely makes me think about how complicated politics can be even on local levels. Really cool structure of multiple narrative arcs but they didn’t converge as neatly as I would’ve liked. Overall, though, really good read.
March 18, 2017
This was a huge mess, albeit a promising and fairly enjoyable one.
Franzen had been reading Pynchon, clearly, and he was ambitious in the best possible way. For a first novel, it's pretty decent.
It's interesting to see him write in this mode, also, having read later efforts that have taken him far away into nuanced characters, family dynamics, and larger and easier to follow narrative chunks. Part of me is a little sad, actually, that he abandoned this mode for that other one, though I certainly recognize how good he is at what he now does. He might have made for a fine Mr. Difficult himself.
One of the messiest aspects of this was the Pynchon-esque conspiracy. When Pynchon does it, I do sometimes find myself wondering if he's only playing or if he actually believes some of his more outrageous stories. Here, though, the conspiracy seems to be a projection of some kind of racial and economic panic, and one images that Franzen himself does not approve. There is no question of that kind of slippage between exaggeration and conspiracy nutjobbery that Pynchon brings, but at the same time, the narrative affirms without any room for doubt that the fears of a General Norris were 100% correct. It's hard to know what to make of this. Perhaps simply that the book's strategy fundamentally doesn't work.
One other thing that this book brought up for me was the never-ending american obsession with race and race and racism as its bedrock truth. I've read other reviews of this, and by GRers whom I respect, that suggest a disappointment that Franzen did not delve deeper or truly into the problem of race, but rather danced somehow around its outskirts, treating economics and legislation and special elections and real estate. And yet, when did economics and legislation and special elections and real estate -- all of the tangible realities of inequality and injustice -- become mysteries to be solved, problems to be uncovered, revealing the bedrock incontrovertible truth of an endemic racism that is its own explanation? Surely this is backwards?
The left (and not only our good friend Pynchon) has long indulged in conspiracy-theories all its own. The truth is always occult and it is always horrible. Only those with the hermeneutic apparatus of impenetrable theory (and its equally bullshit trickle downs) can see reality for what it is. Economics must bow to a sort of original sin which pollutes us all, the only thing not needing further unpacking, decoding, explanation, and that is our curse of racism. We all bear it, and it is the cause of the economics and injustice, not their symptom, their fruit, their strategy, their result. It's a quasi-religious belief verging on puritanism, and pessimistic in the extreme. But why should this be the case? Surely the machine works the other way around?
It's hard, in short, not to connect this sort of complaint about this book to the kind of incessant, ineffective railing against trump voters which takes as a given that we have now exposed the evil at the heart of america, and does not think that this requires anything by way of explanation. In my view, a book that treats criminal justice, economic power, real estate, money, etc. has in fact done a much better job getting at race and racism than yet another tract about how we are all hopelessly, terribly polluted, in need of shaming, of purification, of cleansing, perhaps by means of violence. In this respect, the 27th city seems to me right on the money in its choice of subject matter and emphases, and it is perhaps no wonder at all that it is such a promising, terrible mess.
Franzen had been reading Pynchon, clearly, and he was ambitious in the best possible way. For a first novel, it's pretty decent.
It's interesting to see him write in this mode, also, having read later efforts that have taken him far away into nuanced characters, family dynamics, and larger and easier to follow narrative chunks. Part of me is a little sad, actually, that he abandoned this mode for that other one, though I certainly recognize how good he is at what he now does. He might have made for a fine Mr. Difficult himself.
One of the messiest aspects of this was the Pynchon-esque conspiracy. When Pynchon does it, I do sometimes find myself wondering if he's only playing or if he actually believes some of his more outrageous stories. Here, though, the conspiracy seems to be a projection of some kind of racial and economic panic, and one images that Franzen himself does not approve. There is no question of that kind of slippage between exaggeration and conspiracy nutjobbery that Pynchon brings, but at the same time, the narrative affirms without any room for doubt that the fears of a General Norris were 100% correct. It's hard to know what to make of this. Perhaps simply that the book's strategy fundamentally doesn't work.
One other thing that this book brought up for me was the never-ending american obsession with race and race and racism as its bedrock truth. I've read other reviews of this, and by GRers whom I respect, that suggest a disappointment that Franzen did not delve deeper or truly into the problem of race, but rather danced somehow around its outskirts, treating economics and legislation and special elections and real estate. And yet, when did economics and legislation and special elections and real estate -- all of the tangible realities of inequality and injustice -- become mysteries to be solved, problems to be uncovered, revealing the bedrock incontrovertible truth of an endemic racism that is its own explanation? Surely this is backwards?
The left (and not only our good friend Pynchon) has long indulged in conspiracy-theories all its own. The truth is always occult and it is always horrible. Only those with the hermeneutic apparatus of impenetrable theory (and its equally bullshit trickle downs) can see reality for what it is. Economics must bow to a sort of original sin which pollutes us all, the only thing not needing further unpacking, decoding, explanation, and that is our curse of racism. We all bear it, and it is the cause of the economics and injustice, not their symptom, their fruit, their strategy, their result. It's a quasi-religious belief verging on puritanism, and pessimistic in the extreme. But why should this be the case? Surely the machine works the other way around?
It's hard, in short, not to connect this sort of complaint about this book to the kind of incessant, ineffective railing against trump voters which takes as a given that we have now exposed the evil at the heart of america, and does not think that this requires anything by way of explanation. In my view, a book that treats criminal justice, economic power, real estate, money, etc. has in fact done a much better job getting at race and racism than yet another tract about how we are all hopelessly, terribly polluted, in need of shaming, of purification, of cleansing, perhaps by means of violence. In this respect, the 27th city seems to me right on the money in its choice of subject matter and emphases, and it is perhaps no wonder at all that it is such a promising, terrible mess.
December 24, 2015
Έκανα μια έρευνα στο διαδίκτυο σχετικά με το βιβλίο,διάβασα τα επαινετικά σχόλια και τους εγκωμιαστικούς χαρακτηρισμούς (π.χ ''κλασσικό'') μα δεν μπορώ να πω πως ενθουσιάστηκα από το ''τρομερό παιδί'' της σύγχρονης αμερικανικής λογοτεχνίας.Προσπάθησα,δεν μπορώ να πω πως δεν προσπάθησα.Επί έξι ημέρες το έκανα βόλτες από καναπέ σε καναπέ,ώσπου εγκατέλειψα την προσπάθεια να τελειώσω αυτό το ογκώδες βιβλίο (στην σελίδα 342).
Το Σεντ Λούις βρίσκεται σε παρακμή.Από την τέταρτη θέση που βρισκόταν στην λίστα με τις σημαντικότερες πόλεις των ΗΠΑ,πέφτει στην εικοστή έβδομη.Έτσι οι αρχές αποφασίζουν να διορίσουν ως αρχηγό της τοπικής αστυνομίας την Σ.Τζάμου ,μια νεαρή Ινδή.Φιλόδοξη ,η νέα αρχηγός της αστυνομίας επιδιώκει την οικονομική ενοποίηση του κέντρου με την περιφέρεια του Σεντ Λούις.Έτσι συγκρούεται με τον μεγαλοκατασκευαστή Μάρτιν Προμπστ. Χρησιμοποιώντας αθέμιτα μέσα εναντίον του(θα βάλει να σκοτώσουν τον σκύλο του,να ξελογιάσουν την γυναίκα του) προσπαθεί να επιτεύξει τους στόχους της.
Χαοτική αφήγηση και υστερικός ρεαλισμός.Άθλο αποτελεί η ανάγνωση του βιβλίου,που όπως έμαθα ειναι και το πρωτόλειο του συγγραφέα.Ο αναγνώστης χρειάζεται να καταβάλει πολύ κόπο για να μην αφαιρεθεί και να ξεχωρίσει τα πρόσωπα που παρελαύνουν στις σελίδες. Προτάσεις ασύνδετες,μεγάλες,δίχως κόμμα,δίχως τελεία.
Δεν ξέρω αν αυτή η λιποταξία οφείλεται σε δική μου ανεπάρκεια ή στο γεγονός πως ο Φράνζεν το έγραψε σε νεαρή ηλικία.Πάντως μια εβδομάδα ανάγνωσης χάθηκε.Θέλω την εβδομάδα μου πίσω!
Το Σεντ Λούις βρίσκεται σε παρακμή.Από την τέταρτη θέση που βρισκόταν στην λίστα με τις σημαντικότερες πόλεις των ΗΠΑ,πέφτει στην εικοστή έβδομη.Έτσι οι αρχές αποφασίζουν να διορίσουν ως αρχηγό της τοπικής αστυνομίας την Σ.Τζάμου ,μια νεαρή Ινδή.Φιλόδοξη ,η νέα αρχηγός της αστυνομίας επιδιώκει την οικονομική ενοποίηση του κέντρου με την περιφέρεια του Σεντ Λούις.Έτσι συγκρούεται με τον μεγαλοκατασκευαστή Μάρτιν Προμπστ. Χρησιμοποιώντας αθέμιτα μέσα εναντίον του(θα βάλει να σκοτώσουν τον σκύλο του,να ξελογιάσουν την γυναίκα του) προσπαθεί να επιτεύξει τους στόχους της.
Χαοτική αφήγηση και υστερικός ρεαλισμός.Άθλο αποτελεί η ανάγνωση του βιβλίου,που όπως έμαθα ειναι και το πρωτόλειο του συγγραφέα.Ο αναγνώστης χρειάζεται να καταβάλει πολύ κόπο για να μην αφαιρεθεί και να ξεχωρίσει τα πρόσωπα που παρελαύνουν στις σελίδες. Προτάσεις ασύνδετες,μεγάλες,δίχως κόμμα,δίχως τελεία.
Δεν ξέρω αν αυτή η λιποταξία οφείλεται σε δική μου ανεπάρκεια ή στο γεγονός πως ο Φράνζεν το έγραψε σε νεαρή ηλικία.Πάντως μια εβδομάδα ανάγνωσης χάθηκε.Θέλω την εβδομάδα μου πίσω!
March 14, 2010
Reading this book will give you a tight butt and killer abs. Franzen's first novel makes you work incredibly hard in order to keep up with the breathtaking variety of writing experiments he undertakes, such as (1) switching back and forth between time frames with no visible cues (e.g., line breaks); (2) writing whole page (or multiple page) sections without referring to character names; and (3) "skipping" entire events, requiring the reader to infer what happened between chapters (or parts of a chapter). It feels like Franzen was trying out a lot of techniques, trying to settle on his voice. For someone who reads just a few pages a night before bed, this was challenging. Franzen has an incredible knack for capturing interpersonal relations and describing what people do physically during a dialogue. I found myself skimming the parts about political intrigue (writing about this subject doesn't seem to be his strong suit -- nor did this seem to be what the book was really about) so I could get to the parts about interpersonal dynamics. Even so, the way Franzen closes the book really seems to speak to our times, even though the book is 20+ years old. I haven't read Franzen's masterpiece, The Corrections, but I plan to. His keen insight seems similar (in my mind) to David Foster Wallace's, but Wallace seemed to have an aching love for his subject matter and Franzen seems a little wary of it.
January 3, 2023
It is commonly claimed (and I'd agree) - that Franzen is America's best current writer, and commonly claimed that this is his worst book - one he has even somewhat disowned. (It's a power move for a writer to say that one of their books is bad…) I actually enjoyed this one a lot, right until the last hundred pages or so in which (without spoiling anything) it took a somewhat dramatic turn, unravelled a principal character and submitted another to psychological torture and murder, which felt so unjust and pointless that I was unable to appreciate the main point of the novel, which was, I think, something about the apathy and dullness of 1980s America, whose citizens have become distracted by materialism and anomie and no longer care about nuclear war, civic engagement, or social justice. Young Franzen (he was 25 when this came out) intended to write a Pynchonesque "systems novel"; describing St. Louis on multiple levels, through the business elite, police force, ghetto, malls, youth culture, etc. and how all of these intermesh. I actually found the details about municipal ordinances and tax incentives enjoyable, adding a surprising level of detail that helped immerse me in the novel's main plot (a bizarre conspiracy by Indian expats to gentrify the downtown area via bribery, blackmail and other skullduggery). But with the exception of the main character, Martin Probst - a stock Franzen patriarchal archetype: dour, laconic, frugal, analytical, principled, Republican - most of the characters are flimsy and comical, and as the author moved on in his career he wisely shifted to his core competency, complex and claustrophobic portraits of family life.
Side point: after reading this I listened to some of this Franzen podcast, where a few writers analyse their love-hate relationship with the curmudgeonly 800-pound gorilla of American letters by reading all his books in order. On one episode the always brilliant Nell Zink mentioned an idea that she calls (following David Foster Wallace) "lexical genius", a fallacy writers believe: that knowing an exact term in the English language for everything in the world is valuable, or a substitute for genuine insight. She may be right, but this is also something I really appreciate in writers, and few do it well. (This book taught me the etymology of Velcro!) I remember first coming across it in this lovely scene in DeLillo's Underworld:
Side point: after reading this I listened to some of this Franzen podcast, where a few writers analyse their love-hate relationship with the curmudgeonly 800-pound gorilla of American letters by reading all his books in order. On one episode the always brilliant Nell Zink mentioned an idea that she calls (following David Foster Wallace) "lexical genius", a fallacy writers believe: that knowing an exact term in the English language for everything in the world is valuable, or a substitute for genuine insight. She may be right, but this is also something I really appreciate in writers, and few do it well. (This book taught me the etymology of Velcro!) I remember first coming across it in this lovely scene in DeLillo's Underworld:
"Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from."
This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.
"Those are ugly things, aren’t they?"
"Yes they are."
"Name the parts. Go ahead. We’re not so chi chi here, we’re not so intellectually chic that we can’t test a student face-to-face."
"Name the parts," I said. "All right. Laces."
"Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed."
I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.
"Sole and heel."
"Yes, go on."
I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.
"Proceed, boy."
"There’s not much to name, is there? A front and a top."
"A front and a top. You make me want to weep."
"The rounded part at the front."
"You’re so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You’ve named the lace. What’s the flap under the lace?"
"The tongue."
"Well?"
"I knew the name. I just didn’t see the thing."
He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.
"You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look. And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names."
He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.
A plain black everyday clerical shoe.
"Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel."
"Yes."
"And we’ve identified the tongue and lace."
"Yes," I said.
With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.
"What is it?" I said.
"You tell me. What is it?"
"I don’t know."
"It’s the cuff."
"The cuff."
"The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That’s the counter."
"That’s the counter."
"And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That’s the quarter."
"The quarter," I said.
"And the strip above the sole. That’s the welt. Say it, boy."
"The welt."
"How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don’t know what they’re called. What’s the frontal area that covers the instep?"
"I don’t know."
"You don’t know. It’s called the vamp."
"The vamp."
"Say it."
"The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn’t supposed to memorize."
"Don’t memorize ideas. And don’t take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?"
"This I should know."
"Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue."
"I can’t think of the word. Eyelet."
"Maybe I’ll let you live after all,"
"The eyelets."
"Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace."
He flicked the thing with his middle finger.
"This I don’t know in a million years."
"The aglet."
"Not in a million years."
"The tag or aglet."
"The aglet," I said.
"And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We’re doing the physics of language, Shay."
"The little ring."
"You see it?"
"Yes."
"This is the grommet," he said.
"Oh man."
"The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it."
"I’m going out of my mind."
"This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs—a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?"
"I don’t know."
"A last."
"My head is breaking apart."
"Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said.
"Quotidian."
"An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace."
September 16, 2014
For those confused about the tone of this book, keep in mind it's a farce. Yes, you can see Franzen beginning to develop his trademark of creating deep characters with mixed intentions and loveable weaknesses. But some characters never gel and some get dropped (Duane never gets unmasked?). Who cares? The fun of the book is in the teetering-on-the-edge-of-plausibility plot. Franzen tries to imagine how St. Louisans, his staid, conflicted but conventional St. Louisans would react to terror, fires, kidnapping, spying and political intrigue. Parts of it are really funny, in a ridiculous way. Even the violence had a cartoonish aspect. That will either offend or simply disorient some. I personally am drawn to the playful bitterness of Franzen, and admire how he experimented with the "what if" scenarios that unfold here. All St Louisans and true Franzen fans should at least start this book. You'll either delight in the craziness or know right away to stop.
December 7, 2020
So, ok...
Obviously, it's a little more awkward than his later novels. But I liked the plot. And, obviously it was really, aggressively boring at times. But it was ambitious and poignant at others. It took forever to read, it frequently depressed me, and I didn't really enjoy the process. But also I feel like it's good?
iT'S A fRANZEN.
Obviously, it's a little more awkward than his later novels. But I liked the plot. And, obviously it was really, aggressively boring at times. But it was ambitious and poignant at others. It took forever to read, it frequently depressed me, and I didn't really enjoy the process. But also I feel like it's good?
iT'S A fRANZEN.
August 2, 2015
I loved this book. It was Jonathan Franzen's debut novel and he wrote it about his hometown, St. Louis. The St. Louis connection was fun. It took me awhile to get into the book and figure out what was going on. I think that part of this might have been that the novel when originally submitted was over a thousand pages and Mr. Franzen was immediately told that it had to be severely edited before it was publishable. I am not sure if the author or an editor did the majority of the editing, but it may have delayed some of the clarity of the book's theme. Despite this, it did become clear after a while that the book was a huge satire (with hopefully a large dollop of exaggeration) on the worst of politics and the lengths individuals would go to reach their desired ends. Without being a spoiler, I found the conclusion hilarious and very satisfying. I would definitely recommend this book.
April 25, 2017
Franzen's first novel, and what a great one. A slightly absurdist plot, set in St. Louis, what more do you want?
September 18, 2022
At one point, the author refers to a touchdown as “How Wonderful,” and that is why Daddy Franzen will always be the goat.
March 29, 2016
Twenty Seventh City was reportedly reduced by nearly half to arrive at what is already a jam-packed and often sluggish 500+ pages. As long as it took me to get through the book as it stands, part of me still wants to read his full story. There were characters and plot arcs that were very noticeably dropped wholesale in the editing process, though their roots show tantalizingly throughout. I can only comment on what was published, however, and the plot arc given to the novel’s two black characters was insultingly thin, given the centrality of black Saint Louis to the plot. The degree to which black agency isn’t on display can be rationalized as an accurate depiction of the decision-making processes of Saint Louis’ robber baron elite, which Franzen paints in harrowing detail. However, the novel frequently makes reference to the importance of the leadership in the black community and to the only-hinted-at black opposition to Jammu’s gentrifying plans. Aside from one lone nightclub scene, the reader sees none of this, and it feels as if we’re missing out on a piece of the puzzle. While one could attribute this to the aforementioned cuts, a more realistic explanation is that Franzen was not sufficiently confident in his knowledge of the black community of North Saint Louis to depict them. This makes sense, as North Saint Louis receives none of the accurate descriptions lavished upon his native white suburban Webster Groves, or the pastoral pseudo-exurbs to its west. I can recall only one passage describing a neighborhood of North Saint Louis, an area around which the entire conceit of the novel revolves. His description of East Saint Louis at the end of the novel, while couched in beautiful, dream-like prose describing the final release of a captive woman, reads like the paranoid pearl-clutching way the area is described by West County mothers. I’ve been through East Saint Louis many a time, and I can assure you Jonathan, it is not teeming with writhing hordes of prostitutes gathered around trash-can fires at all times of day.
While the characters were certainly enjoyable, each in their own mostly-but-not-completely despicable way, it was the politics that fed my interest in this novel. It’s a shame Franzen’s follow-up novels (which I’ve yet to read) are more character-driven, as he has a clear acumen for political thought. The political dynamics of Saint Louis’ Shakespearean lust for national recognition drive the story far more than do Probst or Jammu. The novel presents the city and its ascent as the collective fever-dream of its people writ-large, the collective doing as much deciding as the individual characters, only to reveal how misleading this idea was at the end of the novel. Followers of progressive Saint Louis politics will see a lot they recognize here – the city-county merger in particular being a long-term goal of Saint Louis’ left. The unnatural separation causes an imbalance of tax dollars, with taxes from the county’s wealthy going to fund exclusive services, while the city is forced into a much higher tax rate to provide the welfare and services needed for its poor. A merger, in theory, would be a major redistributive effort, resulting in immense benefits to the poor with only minor drawbacks to the rich, let alone the problems of police brutality and educational segregation it would solve. With this in mind it’s quite easy to delude oneself into Jammu’s charm, the socialist police chief who cut her teeth with the admirable Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Throughout my reading of the novel, a part of me wanted deeply to believe this was not a conspiracy, that her schemes were some kind of complex red herring in pursuit of the greater good. However, one of the many political lessons the novel teaches is that policies that seem just can be pursued with the wrong intentions, and with hidden long-term outcomes. And, of course, those outcomes are clear from the start to a less idealistic mind. The Northside speculation and aborted merger only serve to enrich the cleverly-disguised upper-crust Saint Louis families (Anheuser-Busch for Hammaker) and create gentrification driving black families into Pruitt-Igoe-like tenements. The end result of Jammu’s broken windows policing is squalor and misery in Saint Louis’ adjacent areas along with radicalized rage from the local population, a powerful lesson in our post-Ferguson age.
Indeed, Franzen’s foresight in this novel make it well worth reading. The mock terrorist group (the other-kind-of-Indian “Osage Warriors”) and Singh’s comprehensive wire-tapping pre-dated 9/11 and the NSA scandals by a decade. It is, of course, imperfect, with the notable flaws I’ve already mentioned. I had an eye out for Franzen’s much-criticized misogyny and it (mostly) passed. However, nearly every woman in the book fits a certain archetype: attractive, neurotic, and sexually willing. The thoroughly unacknowledged Stockholm syndrome Barbara develops after her two months in captivity (even going so far as to say she missed it and would go back) is particularly gross. Jammu’s character is the primary reason the novel did not give off those vibes, as she is a strong, complex, well-written character. However, a line about her promiscuity in pursuit of male approval in her backstory was absurdly out of character, and in contrast to Probst’s creepy fantasy of her virginity. I also noted that every female character besides Probst’s daughter ends up dead. Definitely noteworthy if one were making a case against Franzen’s depiction of women.
In short, I really enjoyed this novel for both its luxurious prose and its riveting insight into urban politics. I worry that many of the details about Saint Louis’ regional peculiarities are not sufficiently explained, however, and that non-natives may enjoy it less than I did. Undertones of racial ignorance aside, I’d definitely recommend it if you can get through the Saint Louis ephemera and the novel’s size.
While the characters were certainly enjoyable, each in their own mostly-but-not-completely despicable way, it was the politics that fed my interest in this novel. It’s a shame Franzen’s follow-up novels (which I’ve yet to read) are more character-driven, as he has a clear acumen for political thought. The political dynamics of Saint Louis’ Shakespearean lust for national recognition drive the story far more than do Probst or Jammu. The novel presents the city and its ascent as the collective fever-dream of its people writ-large, the collective doing as much deciding as the individual characters, only to reveal how misleading this idea was at the end of the novel. Followers of progressive Saint Louis politics will see a lot they recognize here – the city-county merger in particular being a long-term goal of Saint Louis’ left. The unnatural separation causes an imbalance of tax dollars, with taxes from the county’s wealthy going to fund exclusive services, while the city is forced into a much higher tax rate to provide the welfare and services needed for its poor. A merger, in theory, would be a major redistributive effort, resulting in immense benefits to the poor with only minor drawbacks to the rich, let alone the problems of police brutality and educational segregation it would solve. With this in mind it’s quite easy to delude oneself into Jammu’s charm, the socialist police chief who cut her teeth with the admirable Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Throughout my reading of the novel, a part of me wanted deeply to believe this was not a conspiracy, that her schemes were some kind of complex red herring in pursuit of the greater good. However, one of the many political lessons the novel teaches is that policies that seem just can be pursued with the wrong intentions, and with hidden long-term outcomes. And, of course, those outcomes are clear from the start to a less idealistic mind. The Northside speculation and aborted merger only serve to enrich the cleverly-disguised upper-crust Saint Louis families (Anheuser-Busch for Hammaker) and create gentrification driving black families into Pruitt-Igoe-like tenements. The end result of Jammu’s broken windows policing is squalor and misery in Saint Louis’ adjacent areas along with radicalized rage from the local population, a powerful lesson in our post-Ferguson age.
Indeed, Franzen’s foresight in this novel make it well worth reading. The mock terrorist group (the other-kind-of-Indian “Osage Warriors”) and Singh’s comprehensive wire-tapping pre-dated 9/11 and the NSA scandals by a decade. It is, of course, imperfect, with the notable flaws I’ve already mentioned. I had an eye out for Franzen’s much-criticized misogyny and it (mostly) passed. However, nearly every woman in the book fits a certain archetype: attractive, neurotic, and sexually willing. The thoroughly unacknowledged Stockholm syndrome Barbara develops after her two months in captivity (even going so far as to say she missed it and would go back) is particularly gross. Jammu’s character is the primary reason the novel did not give off those vibes, as she is a strong, complex, well-written character. However, a line about her promiscuity in pursuit of male approval in her backstory was absurdly out of character, and in contrast to Probst’s creepy fantasy of her virginity. I also noted that every female character besides Probst’s daughter ends up dead. Definitely noteworthy if one were making a case against Franzen’s depiction of women.
In short, I really enjoyed this novel for both its luxurious prose and its riveting insight into urban politics. I worry that many of the details about Saint Louis’ regional peculiarities are not sufficiently explained, however, and that non-natives may enjoy it less than I did. Undertones of racial ignorance aside, I’d definitely recommend it if you can get through the Saint Louis ephemera and the novel’s size.
December 14, 2022
Did not finish; soulless; clearly written by a nerd with neither heart nor game; obsessed with cleverness and snickering; does nothing to lift up my spirit or increase my capacity for empathy
April 15, 2011
I am a definite Franzen fan, I loved Freedom and thought the Corrections was a fascinating character study kind of book even if I thought Freedom did laps around it. But this is not in the same class as those two. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it, but at times it felt like a bit of a labor, and if it weren't for the trust Franzen has already built up with me from his past works, I'm not certain I would have seen it through to the end.
The plot is a sprawling conspiracy tale set in St. Louis where an Indian (as in, from India) police chief hatches a massive and often confusing plot to merge St. Louis city and county and grab up as much power and influence in the process as she can. Like Franzen's other novels, the point of view shifts around amongst the characters at breakneck speed and there is no clear protagonist/antagonist, as the shifting viewpoint is used to show the flaws and hidden plots of the many characters.
Her main opponent/target is Martin Probst, a construction guy who is an icon in St. Louis for having built the Arch. Probst's family and their many issues are a big part of the story, and as I could have predicted, I think this is where Franzen is at his best. Even 20+ years ago, he was nothing short of spectacular at writing about the family dynamic.
To me, this book felt just too massive (It was 517 pages with very small typeface) and too ambitious. Because of the amount of local governments and entities and power brokers that are naturally involved in the running of a city and county, he needed a lot characters. I didn't have trouble keeping them straight for the most part, like I saw others complaining about, but the web of the conspiracy is woven so intricately that at times it can be easy to get one plot mixed up with another.
And then I have a few random points I wanted to make
-Why in the hell was there a constant mention of people being sick, as in ill, in this book? I kept waiting for some kind of pay-off, but it never came. This isn't exactly Chekov's Gun theory, but there had to be at least ten different characters who complained about being sick with a nasty cold. Strange.
-In the beginning Franzen makes it clear that this book is a work of fiction and that any similarities between this and real life are not to be taken as any sort of commentary on the real St. Louis. So naturally the thing I am most intrigued by is the comparisons between this and real St. Louis. If anyone knows of any sort of article out there that stacks them up, please let me know.
-In the Corrections and Freedom I loved the way that Franzen played with different styles of writing. I found it refreshing, so I guess it makes sense that this skill was not developed overnight and he had to hone that craft with some less-than-successful attempts at unique styles. This is the place for some of those less-than-successful styles. My personal pet peeve was the device where he would write an entire sequence without identifying whose perspective it was being told from. By the end of the passage I was always able to figure it out, but then I would have to go back and re-read to get a better understanding. That felt like trickery to me and a style for the sake of style, not an actual effective writing tool.
All in all, I thought this book was interesting and I am glad I read it, but be warned going in that it is no picnic and certainly no Freedom.
The plot is a sprawling conspiracy tale set in St. Louis where an Indian (as in, from India) police chief hatches a massive and often confusing plot to merge St. Louis city and county and grab up as much power and influence in the process as she can. Like Franzen's other novels, the point of view shifts around amongst the characters at breakneck speed and there is no clear protagonist/antagonist, as the shifting viewpoint is used to show the flaws and hidden plots of the many characters.
Her main opponent/target is Martin Probst, a construction guy who is an icon in St. Louis for having built the Arch. Probst's family and their many issues are a big part of the story, and as I could have predicted, I think this is where Franzen is at his best. Even 20+ years ago, he was nothing short of spectacular at writing about the family dynamic.
To me, this book felt just too massive (It was 517 pages with very small typeface) and too ambitious. Because of the amount of local governments and entities and power brokers that are naturally involved in the running of a city and county, he needed a lot characters. I didn't have trouble keeping them straight for the most part, like I saw others complaining about, but the web of the conspiracy is woven so intricately that at times it can be easy to get one plot mixed up with another.
And then I have a few random points I wanted to make
-Why in the hell was there a constant mention of people being sick, as in ill, in this book? I kept waiting for some kind of pay-off, but it never came. This isn't exactly Chekov's Gun theory, but there had to be at least ten different characters who complained about being sick with a nasty cold. Strange.
-In the beginning Franzen makes it clear that this book is a work of fiction and that any similarities between this and real life are not to be taken as any sort of commentary on the real St. Louis. So naturally the thing I am most intrigued by is the comparisons between this and real St. Louis. If anyone knows of any sort of article out there that stacks them up, please let me know.
-In the Corrections and Freedom I loved the way that Franzen played with different styles of writing. I found it refreshing, so I guess it makes sense that this skill was not developed overnight and he had to hone that craft with some less-than-successful attempts at unique styles. This is the place for some of those less-than-successful styles. My personal pet peeve was the device where he would write an entire sequence without identifying whose perspective it was being told from. By the end of the passage I was always able to figure it out, but then I would have to go back and re-read to get a better understanding. That felt like trickery to me and a style for the sake of style, not an actual effective writing tool.
All in all, I thought this book was interesting and I am glad I read it, but be warned going in that it is no picnic and certainly no Freedom.
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