How Capitalism Causes Earthquakes
Book
review Josh Rubins
STRONG MOTION By Jonathan Franzen. 508 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux. $22.95.
JONATHAN FRANZEN, an
abundantly gifted writer, has even more nerve than talent. For his debut in
1988 at the age of 29, Mr. Franzen spurned fiction's sturdy, reliable forms
(family memoir, coming-of-age story, novel of manners) and wrote "The
Twenty-seventh City," a sprawling neo-Dickensian hybrid that shouldn't
have worked. His intricate web of subplots came dangerously close to fraying.
And his audacious game plan -- using the city of St. Louis (somewhat
mythicized) as a microcosm of America in the 1980's -- verged on the ponderous.
Yet "The Twenty-seventh City" was held together by the sheer
exuberance of his storytelling and by his vision of the city itself. The novel
did work, magisterially, earning him a Whiting Writers' Award and considerable
critical acclaim.
Now that he's got our
attention, Mr. Franzen hasn't decided to play it safe with his second novel.
"Strong Motion," like "The Twenty-seventh City," is an
elaborate construct, with the stuff of several books crammed into one long,
dense narrative about contemporary urban America. This time the city is Boston,
which has been shaken by a series of minor but unmistakable earthquakes. On its
simplest level the novel is a cautionary ecological thriller featuring Renee
Seitchek, an idealistic 30-year-old Harvard seismologist who believes the
quakes are being triggered by secret drilling and toxic waste dumping at
Sweeting-Aldren, a huge chemical company just north of Boston.
At the same time,
"Strong Motion" sets out to explore -- through Renee's jittery
relationship with a 23-year-old man named Louis Holland -- the nature of
heterosexual romance and abortion politics in the post-feminist, AIDS-aware
1990's. The novel, in fact, ultimately belongs less to Renee than to her
bitter, passive boyfriend, whose late grandfather was one of the architects of
the Sweeting-Aldren empire. Louis's post-adolescent growing pains give the book
its overall shape. Indeed, his family relationships -- with his sarcastic
mother (who has just inherited $22 million in Sweeting-Aldren stock but who
won't give Louis a penny), with his ineffectual father (a pot-smoking history
professor) and with his sleek, business-minded sister -- provide another novel
within the novel, a study of the interaction between kinship and money.
With this bold, layered
design, Mr. Franzen has the opportunity to luxuriate in the textures of
everyday life. In welcome contrast to his minimalist contemporaries, Mr.
Franzen lavishes vigorous, expansive prose not only on the big moments of
sexual and emotional upheaval, but also on various sideshows and subthemes --
sibling rivalry, the exquisite discomfort of being trapped at a bad party and
the fine points of punk-rock nostalgia. He also continues to demonstrate a
remarkable ability to sniff out what he calls "the smell of
infrastructure" and to show how things work -- whether at the failing
radio station where Louis is briefly employed, behind the firmly closed doors
of Sweeting-Aldren's corporate offices or inside the computer room of Harvard's
seismology lab.
Unfortunately, despite the
brilliance of individual set pieces and the intelligence and keen observation
on almost every page, "Strong Motion" loses momentum and conviction
as it expands to meet Mr. Franzen's ambitious specifications. Though it is more
steadily and earnestly realistic in tone than "The Twenty-seventh
City," the narrative here is marred by the unlikely contrivances that link
up the many plots and themes. (The same fundamentalist preacher who confronts
Renee when she seeks an abortion also, coincidentally, buys the radio station
where Louis works.) And the main plot, Renee's investigation of the cause of
the earthquakes, though sporadically fascinating, soon settles into a
conventional potboiler pattern, complete with climactic violence. The issues
that Mr. Franzen wants to take on -- the environment, abortion rights, gender
roles, materialism, religious fanaticism -- seem provocative at first but end
up a blur.
"Strong Motion"
lacks the dynamic center around which even a flawed, overextended novel might
be made to spin. "The Twenty-seventh City" had St. Louis and the
struggle for its control as a focal point. "Strong Motion" has only
poor Louis Holland, whose nihilistic petulance and passivity are persuasively
rendered but of limited interest. Even after several hundred pages of
Bildungsroman material (Louis falls in love with Renee, mistreats her and
suffers for it), he remains far too callow to carry a book of this size and
reach: his "sorrow was the only thing he had that indicated there might be
more to the world than the piggishness and stupidity and injustice which every
day were extending their hegemony."
Still, however uneven this
second novel is, it is less a disappointment than an affirmation of Mr.
Franzen's fierce imagination and distinctive seriocomic voice. Whether he
continues to be something of a daredevil or scales down his aspirations (at
least one small, richly satisfying novel seems to be lurking inside
"Strong Motion"), his will be a career to watch.
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