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Mar. 8th, 2007 06:05 pmWhy do I feel like my life has been consumed lately? Where does all my time go? Why do feel like I have so much going on? I've been trying to get this post up for days now, but I haven't even had the chance to sit down and write a simple review. What's the deal? Fortunately it appears that my Thrusday night student is standing me up (Surprise, surprise! He does this all the time.) so I'll put the time to good use and finally write this review. Without further ado:
Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, is a big, elaborate book that's packed with…well, with all sorts of things: earthquakes in greater Boston, familial dysfunction in the extreme, the antics of a clinic-picketing minister of an anti-abortion church, grouchy observations about American culture at the end of the ‘80s, the misdeeds of an environmentally irresponsible chemical company, an attempted murder, vast sums of money being thrown about, and the Red Sox losing the playoffs. The book follows Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek as they fall in love with each other and attempt to find their way through all the chaos of the narrative.
It’s exciting to watch a writer try to pull off a book as ambitious as this one, but I always get so disappointed if they don’t succeed. Franzen gets close to realizing his ambitions with Strong Motion, but the book never really gels. I think this may be partly due to the sheer volume of what the book contains—there’s just too much stuff competing for the reader’s attention, and the split focus on reproductive rights and environmentalism means that neither issue gets explored in a satisfying way. The real problem, though, is the characters. They just don’t make sense. I wanted to like Renee and there were times when I found myself identifying with her quite strongly, but there were also many moments when she would do or say something that would leave me shocked that Franzen believed that a 30-year-old woman would think/feel/act like that. And it wasn’t just the 30-year-old woman, either. All of the characters had these slips, where suddenly their motivations stopped making sense, or their reactions suddenly seemed out of proportion to the situation, or the decisions they made felt like choices that no human on the face of the earth would ever pick.
I was troubled by odd bits of disconnection in the plot, as well. Why, for instance, when Louis is initially presented to us as a typical nerdy loner—a pale, lumpen guy who’s losing his hair at 23, who wears aviator glasses, who spends his spare time fiddling with transistor radios in his bedroom, who is still much more boy than man—does he end up being fought over by two different women? I have nothing against nerdy guys, but Franzen set Louis up as such a loser that I found it very hard to believe that both women (and especially the beautiful and superficial Lauren) would be interested in him. It’s very hard for a book to recover once it’s gone too far over the plausibility line, and Strong Motion did that more than once.
Despite its flaws, Strong Motion is a decent book. It’s entertaining, there’s enough intrigue in the plot to keep things moving at a pretty good clip, and Franzen’s prose is sharp. It's also very evident that a lot of research went into producing it. The book feels almost like a practice exercise for The Corrections—similar themes handled with less assurance—and although it’s not nearly as good, fans of The Corrections may be interested in reading this book to trace the origins of the better novel.
I'm now reading Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, and enjoying it quite a bit. It's no Cloud Atlas, but it is a fun read.
Strong Motion, Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, is a big, elaborate book that's packed with…well, with all sorts of things: earthquakes in greater Boston, familial dysfunction in the extreme, the antics of a clinic-picketing minister of an anti-abortion church, grouchy observations about American culture at the end of the ‘80s, the misdeeds of an environmentally irresponsible chemical company, an attempted murder, vast sums of money being thrown about, and the Red Sox losing the playoffs. The book follows Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek as they fall in love with each other and attempt to find their way through all the chaos of the narrative.
It’s exciting to watch a writer try to pull off a book as ambitious as this one, but I always get so disappointed if they don’t succeed. Franzen gets close to realizing his ambitions with Strong Motion, but the book never really gels. I think this may be partly due to the sheer volume of what the book contains—there’s just too much stuff competing for the reader’s attention, and the split focus on reproductive rights and environmentalism means that neither issue gets explored in a satisfying way. The real problem, though, is the characters. They just don’t make sense. I wanted to like Renee and there were times when I found myself identifying with her quite strongly, but there were also many moments when she would do or say something that would leave me shocked that Franzen believed that a 30-year-old woman would think/feel/act like that. And it wasn’t just the 30-year-old woman, either. All of the characters had these slips, where suddenly their motivations stopped making sense, or their reactions suddenly seemed out of proportion to the situation, or the decisions they made felt like choices that no human on the face of the earth would ever pick.
I was troubled by odd bits of disconnection in the plot, as well. Why, for instance, when Louis is initially presented to us as a typical nerdy loner—a pale, lumpen guy who’s losing his hair at 23, who wears aviator glasses, who spends his spare time fiddling with transistor radios in his bedroom, who is still much more boy than man—does he end up being fought over by two different women? I have nothing against nerdy guys, but Franzen set Louis up as such a loser that I found it very hard to believe that both women (and especially the beautiful and superficial Lauren) would be interested in him. It’s very hard for a book to recover once it’s gone too far over the plausibility line, and Strong Motion did that more than once.
Despite its flaws, Strong Motion is a decent book. It’s entertaining, there’s enough intrigue in the plot to keep things moving at a pretty good clip, and Franzen’s prose is sharp. It's also very evident that a lot of research went into producing it. The book feels almost like a practice exercise for The Corrections—similar themes handled with less assurance—and although it’s not nearly as good, fans of The Corrections may be interested in reading this book to trace the origins of the better novel.
I'm now reading Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, and enjoying it quite a bit. It's no Cloud Atlas, but it is a fun read.
