I have said in other
reviews, mainly ones I wrote on Dave Egger’s books that him and Jonathan
Franzen have really swapped places in American literature today. Years ago, I
felt Eggers was a pompous ass and Franzen was the cool one. Now, I feel there
places have changed a bit, with Eggers producing unique books filled with
innovation and emotion, while Franzen seems content to publish very little
fiction and still come off like a grumpy old man. But there was a time where he
wasn’t, and before he became famous for The Corrections, he wrote Strong
Motion, a flawed yet fun novel that combines the muckraker’s eye for fiction
that possessed Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, with some decidedly
post-modern aspects that took me by surprise coming from a straight-forward
writer like Franzen. It produces mixed results, with some elements outshining
others, but it is no way a bad book. The novel focuses on the Holland family,
as most Franzen books tend to focus on families. They are reeling from the
death of their matriarch, who dies in a rather funny way when she falls off the
barstool in her large home during an earthquake, making her the only victim
that is tallied. During a bitter feud over her inheritance, Louis, the idiot
son of the family, falls in love with Renee, a seismologist who uncovers some
damning facts about what caused the earthquake while taking a harrowing journey
with the unstable Louis. The beginning is great, detailing Louis’s relationship
with his seemingly much more successful sister Eileen. But Louis is too much of
a blank slate to be interesting, with events going on around him without his participation.
I was much more interested in people like Renee, who has a section involving
abortion that really elevates this book. It is far from something as the
arguably generation defining Freedom, but this long book was never anything but
satisfying.
Rating: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment