Strong Motion: Amazon.ca: Jonathan Franzen: Books

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Debates over women's reproductive rights and environmental disasters rattle the lives of young lovers in Boston in Franzen's ( The Twenty-Seventh City ) second intellectual thriller.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

An earthquake that 23-year-old Louis Holland doesn't even feel shakes the Boston area and sets in motion a chain of events in this multilayered, metaphor-studded novel with a love story at its core. After Louis's step-grandmother is the quake's only fatality, his mother inherits millions in stock of chemical company Sweeting-Aldren, and Louis meets seismologist Renee Seitchek, who shares her bed and her theory with him. When tremors continue in the Northeast, scientists study fault lines, a fundamentalist anti-abortion minister credits God's wrath, and Renee suggests "induced seismicity" from Sweeting-Aldren's longtime secret pumping of industrial wastes into a deep well. Franzen ( The Twenty-Seventh City , LJ 11/1/88) 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.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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First Sentence
Sometimes when people asked Eileen Holland if she had any brothers or sisters, she had to think for a moment. Read the first page

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Concordance

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

3.9 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Does the earth move for you?, Dec 13 2003

By

William Whyte (Somerville, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Strong Motion: A Novel (Paperback)

Great things about this novel include:

- The central idea -- both the concept of earthquakes in the Boston area, and the concept of how they might have been caused.
- The writing -- full of brilliant images, razor-sharp observation, and humanity. Franzen is the only novelist I know whose characters have the real-life habit of ending sentences with "so", as in "Well, he's coming in tomorrow, so." Other reviewers have commented on the raccoon sequence, which is affecting and unforgettable.
- The setting -- if Boston were destroyed in an earthquake, you could reconstruct it from the description given in the book.
- The social conscience -- in particular, the sequence about the effects of the settlers on New England stands out.
- And the gutsiness of having a character who's a militant anti-abortionist with a heart of gold.

The weaknesses:
- The main characters aren't entirely likeable. This applies particularly to the female characters; Louis's mother Melanie is an ogre, his sister Eileen is a spoiled idiot, his Texan girlfriend Lauren is just an annoyance. Even Renee, the main female character, is curiously static; Louis develops far more as the book goes on.
- It's such a big, ambitious book, and yet a small number of main characters are linked into all the plots. In particular, it seems contrived that Eileen's boyfriend Peter has a direct family link into the vast conspiracy.

The weaknesses -- in particular, the events leading up to Louis and Renee's separation halfway through the book -- made me so impatient that I actually gave up reading it for a while. But I'm very glad I returned to it. A lot of the most memorable passages are in the second half, there's a great sense of gathering apocalypse and all the pleasures of a well-constructed thriller, and it ends on an emotional high that prefigures, but doesn't quite match, that at the end of The Corrections. Definitely worth a read, particularly if (by sheer coincidence) you live on the same street as the hero...

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1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, Dec 31 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Strong Motion: A Novel (Paperback)

I love Jonathan Franzen's work, especially The Twenty Seventh City, which is just brilliant. The Corrections is pretty good too. But I am terriby disappointed by his second novel, Strong Motion. It is murky, implausible, pointless, and devoid of admirable characters, moving sentiments or delightful plot twists. Don't waste your money.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Better than The Corrections, Jun 30 2003

By

F. T. Litz "Franz" (Niskayuna, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Strong Motion: A Novel (Paperback)

I picked up Strong Motion after enjoying Franzen's The Corrections. The story lines in this novel are more complexly layered than those in The Corrections, but also more tightly organized. Most notably, in stark contrast to The Corrections, Franzen does not send us off to the Baltics to experience needless side stories. Every overlapping and interwoven piece of text is important to the rest of the novel.

Brief decriptions of the plot do not do the book justice, because they come off as unbelievable, even gimmicky. While Franzen does take bold risks with this story and his characters, this novel is so well crafted that I did not even pause to consider whether a particular plot twist was plausible. Like all good fiction, the unreal becomes real as the story unfolds.

With rich, conflicted characters and smart, penetrating observations of American society, Franzen's Strong Motion is a master work. It is easy to see why there was such a buzz around the release of The Corrections: Franzen is one of the best contemporary American literary fiction has to offer.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Shaky Loving
Franzen's "Strong Motion" is a good entrypoint into his oeuvre. As a Southern California resident, I am attracted to earthquake-related fiction, and the pathetic irony Franzen... Read more

Published on Dec 20 2002 by I. Brynjegard-Bialik

3.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious, experimental, messy
I read Strong Motion after reading Franzen's excellent The Corrections, a much more complete novel that is superior to this one in almost every aspect. Read more

Published on Jun 19 2002 by Christopher A. Smith