”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 contra...

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 w

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. Over...

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.

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...

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 distribut...

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.

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...

Let'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 ra...

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 e...

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 Jo...

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 certainl...

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

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 si...