Synopses & Reviews
The city of Boston is being rattled by earthquakes and rocked by anti-abortion protests when Louis Holland meets Renee Seitchek. Louis is an angry member of the Nowhere Generation; Renee is a passionate and embittered seismologist seven years his senior. Their love-hate love affair has scarcely begun when Renee begins to wonder: Could the earthquakes have a human cause? Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed Twenty-Seventh City and The Corrections, has created an intoxicating, provocative vision of a society divided against itself and catastrophically at odds with nature.
Review
"Unfortunately, the dichotomies between romance and science, abortion and the environment are unresolved, and the self-pity in Louis's nihilism as he rails against mother, father, sister, the world, and himself makes him a cold and distant protagonist. A brooding tale of personal responsibility and dangerous legacies that's ambitious and impressive but finally overreaches itself." Kirkus Reviews
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"No doubt about it: Jonathan Franzen is one of the most extraordinary writers around." Laura Shapiro, Newsweek
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"Ingeniously put together....His ear for American vernacular is flawless....His gift for description has a kinetic immediacy....One of the best writers under forty at work in this country." Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
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"By sheer force of his imaginative writing and his unsheathed views of American life, Mr. Franzen succeeds in joining together a love story, a family story, and a corporate-cum-environmental story....Distinctly original." Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
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"Populous, ambitious, expansive...Franzen has courage...[and] is a writer of abundant energies." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
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"[Franzen] tries for, and achieves, more than all but two or three in the successor generation to Pynchon and DeLillo. He may well be one of the successors." Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Franzen may push an occasional metaphor too far, but distractions fade in the face of fine characterizations in a context of science grounded in history with well-integrated social messages and a subtext of the Boston Red Sox breaking fans' hearts. Impressive." Library Journal
Synopsis
Franzen's dazzling follow-up to The Twenty-Seventh City is about earthquakes, pollution, love, and abortion rights.
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
Synopsis
From THE NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of The Corrections and Freedom
New York Times Bestselling Author
National Book Award Winner
"Jonathan Franzen, an abundantly gifted writer, has even more nerve than talent" (The New York Times), and he refuses to play it safe in this bold, layered ecological thriller.
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of strange happenings--earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance, Louis falls in love with a young seismologist, Ren e Seitchek, whose theory about the origin of the earthquakes turns his world upside down.
"No doubt about it: Jonathan Franzen . . . is one of the most extraordinary writers around." --Newsweek
"Strong Motion seems for a while like a brilliant chaos. Bit by bit, the chaos settles . . . the brilliant things remain, and the connections among them begin to appear." --Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
A suspenseful, complex novel dealing with the issues of our day environmental pollution, religious fundamentalism, abortion, and the threat of apocalypse. It is also a tender and fresh love story a story of betrayal and redemption from the author of The Twenty-Seventh City.
Synopsis
Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first one kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes' cause complicate everything.
About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is also the author of the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and The Corrections. His fiction and nonfiction appear frequently in The New Yorker and Harper's, and he was named one of the best American novelists under forty by Granta and The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.