A tour de force of storytelling and unbelievably insights into technical matters. The inside and backstory about how corporations become corrupt rings true, and the human elements that shape it. Franzen is truly one of the greatest modern american novelists. Told from flawed but interesting protagonists about the excesses of industry with catastrophic consequences. I have only his latest now to read.

Reading “Strong Motion” felt like having an exquisite meal with well aged wine. Franzen is a true master. His characters are complex and multidimensional drawing one’s attention towards themselves and this attention is constantly fuelled by building up expectations to discover yet another aspect of an individual. The author tells the story from different people’s perspectives delving into their past to shed some light on why they are what they are in the present, but he tends to do this in a ver...

The destruction that is wrought by Mother Nature is one thing, but a person's own self destructive nature is something else entirely. A rare Boston earthquake is the true starting off point for this novel, from there we are exposed to all the flawed aspects of each of the characters and the complicated relationships with one another, as well as themselves. Much of this book is painfully masochistic, but people often self-sabotage when they are presented with the terrifyingly real possibility of

I finally made my way through this vast, amazing epic of a book. I know that I often say that I loved books here. But this one is different, for one thing, it convinced me that Jonathan Franzen is a prescient genius (something I was decidedly not in agreement with before I picked this up). The writing is so precise and dense, yet compelling and readable at the same time. The issues he tackles are huge (coming of age after college, love, commitment, the relationships between parents and their adu...

After reading Jonathan Franzen's more recent blockbusters, I'd expected to be disappointed in this earlier novel. I was not. In some ways, it was more substantial and more relevant to me than his latest tome, Purity. For one thing, I do enjoy and find fascinating his digressions, how he annexes history lectures and background information as part of his story, instead of bogging us readers down with end notes. I felt that this information added to my appreciation of what was going on in the prese...

First, a caveat: Strong Motion is not The Corrections. It does not deliver the scintillating prose, caustic wit, and epic scope of Franzen's National Book Award winning later novel. It's an eccentric and lengthy book that, for better or worse, dons a variety of identities: suspense, romance, family melodrama, didactic political novel, bildungsroman, perhaps more. There are subplots and mere meanderings, but Franzen ties them all into the relationship between Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek, and...

Seeing as he has a new book coming out this fall, I figured I should polish off the last of Franzen's Fictions I hadn't read. Franzen's first novel, The 27th city, was a large, unfocused, sprawling thing with the very occasionally beautiful sentence or passage to keep the reader going. It was, basically, a complete mess. Strong Motion is his first novel that actually functions as a novel. The narrative focus is sharper, the plotting a bit more developed, the characters a little bit better drawn,...

I remember being seduced to the point of debility by The Corrections (blowing off social outings I was actually looking forward to; missing the Sporanos), which I still can't get over. Strong Motion just confirms that I have a real weakness for Franzen's writing, and also that in my mind he is a genius. Nobody's characters come alive for me the way his do. He just bloody nails it. People are so weird--"ordinary people"--there's no such thing. Everybody is so weird and their ridiculous quirks and...

This was such a deep,thoughtful and intelligent read and in places was reminiscent of Don Delillo's White Noise. Starts with Louis Holland(a pretty sad and pathetic young man)who falls for seismologist Renee Seitcheck when she is investigating a recent earthquake, where we go from here is sort of a industry/scientific thriller with a religious/pro life element thrown into the mix as well, sounds odd? but it all somehow works. Set in and around the Boston area every location is deeply accurate wh...

In Strong Motion, Franzen's second novel, new college graduate Louis Holland moves to Boston to work a minimum wage job at a radio station. An earthquake kills his step-grandmother, his mother inherits her $22 million estate, and Louis has a conflicted relationship with his older sister Eileen, who is very mean. Eileen's boyfriend's father works for an evil chemicals manufacturing company who has been pumping toxic waste deep into the earth, which a Harvard seismologist named Renee believes is c...

I liked The Corrections, thought Freedom was 'meh,' and could not even struggle through this one. I gave up 250 pages in when I still did not care about a single character beyond hoping that the next earthquake would kill them all.

Alright, so Franzen is clearly incredibly intelligent. He also did a lot of research for this one. On the other hand, maybe this was all knowledge he already had since he was a student of environmental sciences. An extra long novel, there are multiple complex storylines running throughout. Thorough character studies, important themes, & engaging plot changes. But still very, very long. I love a good, thorough, lengthy novel. But there was so much information here, most of which I have to admit I...

Although Strong Motion (1992) was not a critical or financial success, it is an early indication that Jonathan Franzen is a gifted writer in the stratum of literary fiction. He’s had the good fortune to have the support that allows him to focus on his work, not every writer has that luxury, but for certain, this doesn’t mean I think he goes through life unscathed — no one does. While reading, I could see the set up for the ambitious tome, The Corrections in between the pages of Strong Motion. I

Better than the first, though the disjointed dialogue floats like lumps of undigested Don DeLillo. The religious fanatic Stites is well-drawn: an ad man in the wrong business. Like the later The Corrections this uses an event (in this case a natural disaster) to tie its themes together.

Earthquakes rock Boston as our protagonist, Louis Holland, navigates a cityscape seemingly brimming with all of the post-utopian angst that Franzen is purportedly famous for exposing: evil corporations destroying our environment in their relentless quest for wealth, pro-lifers picketing and protesting the abortion clinics that proliferate in the liberal northeast, egocentric ivy league elites sipping coffee in Cambridge and intellectualizing much of the above. Not to mention the secondary charac...

For some reason I thought this was a new book; I was super excited when I saw it online, but when I actually got it realized that it was written in the 90s. I'm not entirely sure why that is relevant, but while I consistently put The Corrections at the top of my list of "must reads", I found this to be less than enthralling.The plot felt rather silly; the characters are so self involved and unlikeable and while the idea of corporate crime through pollution is serious and real, the interaction of...

After reading The Corrections, Freedom and Purity and loving all three of them I consider myself a huge Franzen groupie and so it was expected that I would eventually go back to read his debut and sophomore novels, even if I kept hearing from everyone and their mother that his first two writing attempts aren't as good and that they just aren't like Franzen at all. Well these people were both wrong and right, at least when it comes to Strong Motion (I will eventually pick up The Twenty-Seventh Ci...