Customer Reviews

The 27th City

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This was one of those books that kept me up at night. The story was very involving and Franzen's technique of alternating narrative perspectives among a large cast drew me on. I would look at the first line of the next chapter or sub-asterisk and feel compelled to find out what was going on with that character.

I live in a city that is smaller than St. Louis, but the social stratication, economic segregation, and political altercations were all quite familiar. I was not particularly surprised to read the disbelieving reaction of a reviewer from St. Louis ("this is not my town!"). Franzen pre-zinged her by building up to an election that no one apparently cared about. You spend first 7/8 of the book being led to believe that the whole city is in an uproar about the "reign" of S. Jammu, only to have the election show that the county/city consolidation issue was only of interest to the players and to the media who were hyping it. No one else was paying any attention.

This is a wickedly funny book, both in the way it deploys broad comic themes like the one above and also in little zingers aimed at various social groups. Franzen aims most of his barbs at what is presumably his own social milieu: the white suburban uppermiddle to upper class. But he has some left over for the black middle class and Indian socialists.

As has been stated by other reviewers, Franzen is primarily a story teller and secondarily a stylist. There are, however, similarities between this book and D.F. Wallace's Infinite Jest. One obvious similarity is the epic scope. Another is the multi-personal narrative. The scathingly critical and borderline cynical perspective on politics. The recurrent dwelling upon the details of substance abuse (although Wallace is much more obsessive). The selection of an unlikely ethnic group as the source of an anti-American conspiracy. The occasional passages of pure hallucinogenic description.

That Franzen wrote this book in the 80s is impressive. He saw a lot of stuff coming and yet a lot of the details of the book are charmingly dated (e.g., Probst's delight in the novelty of using a phone in a car). I found myself wondering what the (surviving) characters were up to today. I visited St. Louis in 1990 and found the downtown to be a sad and lifeless place (including the Disneyfication of Laclede's Landing). I hope the 90s were good to it.

I must say that I am very surprised by the several lackluster reviews this book received here, which is why I am anxious to add my own glowing endorsement. THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY is one of the most incisive and visionary novels about the strata of American society published in the past 15 years. It brings to life the economic, political, racial, and personal forces behind urban reform more vividly, and humorously, than any other contemporary fiction of which I know. Its investigations of gentrification in St. Louis, and of the incessant struggles and backstabbing between the city's power elite, seem to become more timely and topical with each passing day, at least if the present courses of so many American cities (including my own) are any indication. The fact that Franzen wrote the book in the Eighties, and that he centers its events on a wicked satire of nearly implausible foreign conspiracy and much-too-real American paranoia, only add to my admiration of it.

As for Franzen's writing, I want to say that I don't think his style is any less 'brilliant' than that of his contemporaries; he just isn't compelled to suspend the novel's progress and tap us on the shoulder every time he is about to perform a stylistic trick. That is not to say that the tricks aren't still there. So much the better for the astute reader anyway, because here you will find consistently strong, funny, and surprising writing that advances the book's story and characters throughout. It's a read that amazingly satisfies our desires for entertainment and intellectual stimulation simultaneously.

I can't say enough good things about "The Corrections." Because of that, I had really high hopes for "The Twenty-Seventh City." I couldn't have been more disappointed in a book.

Complicated, ambitious characters and plot-lines and themes don't scare me; I prefer those types of stories. But I could not follow this thing at all. Many times, I found my mind wandering on other exciting subjects such as what I'm gonna cook for dinner or when am I gonna sort the socks.

S Jammu was a corrupt person with an agenda and that was the only thing that was obvious. The other sub-plots and characters had no connection as far as I could tell. The business themes and story lines were boring for me. The in-depth descriptions of the real estate business held nothing of interest.

I give this book two stars because in Franzen style the descriptions were outstanding.

I wouldn't tell anyone NOT to read this book. I just didn't happen to get it. I do think there are plenty of people out there who would have an appreciation for this bizarre story.

I was interested in this book because of the uncommon setting of St. Louis--a city I love, but one that is definitely falling apart. That decay is beautifully described by Franzen. There's no doubt that the prose in 'The Twenty-Seventh City' nearly always sparkles and only occasionally falls flat, usually when he gets too caught up in his philosophical meanderings inside the head of Martin Probst (who is quietly and slowly lovable). There are so many artful descriptions and astute retellings of every-day occurrences to propel readers. Unfortunately, the interesting premise never expands much beyond its setup in the first 50 pages. S. Jammu and her comrades are interesting, but haughty, and their reasons for taking on their twisted plot are never clarified beyond vague sketches of their activist and corrupted pasts. EVERYone in high society, apparently, enters into either physical or intellectual affairs, which often defy their characterisations, and there are so many characters that are highlighted in their dull everyday routines just to service their importance in the book's ending that it drags down the beginning in middle. And when the climax of a 500-page novel hinges on the outcome of a referendum vote... well, I think that's all that needs to be said about that.

Still, Franzen's observations on our every day lives and interactions are shocking in their familiarity, and he undeniably has a good grip on many facets of how our society and culture functions. Twenty years after the fact his comments are still relevant. 'The Twenty-Seventh City' is worth reading, but only if read quickly; labouring over it and its blunted intricacies is not worth the time.

I've really enjoyed the other things that I've read by Franzen (The Corrections; How to Be Alone, a book of essays), but I found "The Twenty Seventh City" to be nearly unreadable. The only reason that I persevered to the end was that I was stuck on a 6-hour cross-country flight with nothing else to read. As it was, I wound up skimming the last 100 pages.

Two of the biggest problems with this book are an overabundance of minor characters and a very choppy narrative, in which the average scence is about 1 to 2 pages. It's just jump after jump after jump for 500 pages, with no sustained development of anything. I also found the basic premise (a police colonel and cousin of Indira Ghandi from India comes to the US to take over the police force of St. Louis, where she uses a band of Indian terrorists to manipulate the city's business and political elite and control the real estate market) so implausible that it was just a constant stumbling block all though the book. None of the characters struck me as remotely believable or interesting. I suppose it was intended as some sort of farce, but I don't think I encountered a single thing that I thought was humorous. Then there is the dialect... rather than developing distinctive characters, the author writes in truly awful dialect (eg, a character who says things like "Habout time" or "Hanyway"; and of course, a police officer with a lisp).

Altogether, this may be most excruciating piece of fiction writing I've read in the last 5 years.

Jonathan Franzen is an accomplished writer. However, that doesn't stop this book from being a clunker. Having started and stopped several times, I finally got stuck at page 215 and have not had the energy or willpower to go further. His plot is bizarre and the characters arouse little sympathy; the prose does little to propel you on. I would recommend The Corrections for anyone intrigued by his style but unwilling to take a chance on this early poorly-received work of his.

I'm not sure whether the other reviewers were reading the same book!

The 27th City is both funny, enjoyable to read, and also prescient -- Franzen essentially provides a look at "outsourcing" long before that became a hot topic, except that what's being outsourced to India is the police, corruption, and local politics!

Sound confusing and unfamiliar? Sure. But what really good literature doesn't defamiliarize our surroundings? Read the first chapter and you will be hooked. Frazen's premise is tremendously original. This is basically a more readable version of DeLillo's use of surreal plots to comment on very real problems, with a lot of dark humor thrown in to sweeten the p(l)ot.

I have never been to St. Louis, but Franzen's depiction of big-city decline, desperation and corruption is familiar (and compelling) to anyone who lives in an aging city in the country's old industrial belt. Franzen's audacity and confidence in sticking to this odd plot is stunning. The book is one of the funniest I have read in some time, and one of the smartest.

When it comes to The Twenty-Seventh City, it seems most reviewers fall pretty far on either side of the fence. While some praise its social and political insights and (perhaps a little overzealously) defend it as the greatest American novel ever written, dissenting reviewers seem to find Franzen's debut to be completely the opposite--dry, uninspired, full of uninteresting characters, and of little relevance when compared to a work like The Corrections.

It seems that most of the reviewers who are disappointed with TT-SC feel the way they do because, ultimately, in the back of their minds, they were hoping for another Corrections. And while The Corrections was a much more engaging novel, for myself, than the TT-SC, I acknowledge that if Franzen only wrote variations on The Corrections, even its most die-hard fans would eventually tire of Franzen's work. The beauty of Franzen, for me, is his ability to sink himself so completely into the themes and morals of a work that while, from book to book, the same research-heavy, image-laden writing style pervades, each book of Franzen's is ultimately unique. As one reviewer so succinctly put it, TT-SC is Franzen's novel about government, Strong Motion is his novel about the soul, and The Corrections is his novel about families. (Although it's worth saying that each of these novels carry all three themes at some point in their telling.)

I believe it is impossible to get an accurate perspective on this book if you come from a place that hungers merely for another Corrections. While TT-SC, in the end, was no Strong Motion, and no Corrections, it had its merits. As a debut novel, it was ambitious, patient, and both grand (in its ability to mirror the political dynamics of so many small cities) and intricate (in its ability to sort through all aspects of a political issue) in scope. Having read Franzen's novels backwards, from most recent work to earliest work, I was able to view, by regression, the ways in which he matured from novel to novel. True Franzen fans will enjoy this exercise, and may even appreciate the work required to keep up with the pace of the story. Others (mainly fans of the Corrections and the Corrections only) will see no reason to put up the effort and maintain the stamina needed to stay abreast.

In the end, the book disappoints perhaps because so many of the main events of the book themselves come to an anticlimax: the election results are little more than a mute point, many characters die suddenly and pointlessly, and Probst, while genuinely sorry for the loss of Barbara, ultimately continues to be less than the man we had all hoped for. When so many aspects of a book fall simply flat, it is hard to not close the book with the same feeling of flatness. Strong Motion ended on such a high note that I had hoped for similar retribution from the TT-SC's main characters. However, in the end, it seems no one really learned any lessons or really paid for their misdoings; most merely took the easy way out--escape in its many forms.

I believe that this is not a flaw on the part of Franzen's writing; it's perhaps his biggest point--and biggest joke--that everything ended up the way it did, that good men could go so bad, that supposedly strong women could die so disastrously. That governments, organizations, and even families, can dissolve into indifference so easily. For this message, we cannot decry the messenger. It is what it is what it is.

This is a fun and quietly zany book about a host of political players caught up in a one-horse conspiracy to rezone the city - for vast real-estate profits - and the vain fledgling counter-conspiracy that springs up to try to stop it. A great soup of quirky, convincing characters who continuously flavor one other's actions and motives.

I loved the Corrections and the writing here is similar, if not nearly identical in tone, style and purpose. But where his later smash hit was about small circumstances and grand themes, "The Twenty-Seventh City" is about supposedly soaring politicos and the mundane goals they fight for with all their might. The great farce of "The Twenty-Seventh City" - if you want to look at that way - is that for all their outsized and often self-imposed importance, these characters end up really going nowhere, achieving nothing.