I am an avid fan of Franzen and had high hopes for this book. However, it was nothing like "The Corrections", "Freedom", or "Purity".

It seemed to progress at a sluggish pace, making it a real chore to read. I stubbornly persisted until the end, hoping that it would improve, but I was never truly satisfied.

All of the characters lacked depth and failed to engage me. I couldn't connect with a single one, especially the main character, Louis.

Moreover, given Franzen's penchant for including sex in his novels, the numerous sex scenes in this particular work felt overly explicit and bordered on misogynistic.

If you're considering this as your first Franzen read, I would highly recommend stopping. You would be much better off exploring his other works, particularly the three novels mentioned earlier.

I truly hope that this book is an anomaly in his collection. I'm eager to hear from other Franzen fans which of his books I should try next to recapture the feeling I had after finishing "The Corrections", "Freedom", or "Purity".

I am currently having an extremely difficult time with this book. It is an early work of Franzen, and he is indeed one of my favorite authors. However,

there are moments when I earnestly wish he would just stop talking and progress with the story already. On the other hand, there are also times when a bit more detailed explanation would seem quite appropriate. I am doing my best to follow the characters and understand most of their motivations, but there are some finer nuances that truly elude me. For instance, I simply don't understand why Renee is behaving in such a way towards Louis' mom. I feel like I'm missing something crucial.

Note to myself: I am aware that it could potentially be the timing of my reading this particular book, considering my concentration has been all muddled up. Nevertheless, I should keep going. After all, I can always reread it in the future.

FINISHED. Overall, it is well-written. It managed to draw all the elements together more effectively towards the ending. However, it is not my absolute favorite among Franzen's works.

I generally think of Franzen as a kind of neo-Victorianist writer. His work is pretty good, though perhaps not quite as excellent as his reputation suggests. In my opinion, being a neo-Victorianist is a compliment. It means he is interested in creating novels that chronicle the full range of society. He wants to展示 the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly. In this regard, as I see it, he mirrors the superior work of his one-time classmate Donna Tartt in her wonderful The Goldfinch. However, looking at this early novel of his, I can see that the path he took to reach that point went through a period of semi-clumsy post-modernism.

At least that's my excuse for what would otherwise just be a fundamental clumsiness in a novel that has a lot to recommend it. This one opens with Eileen Holland observing her brother. But that's misleading because it's Louis Holland who is the much more central character. That is, until the focus switches inexplicably to his one-time girlfriend Renee Seitchek. Then she's the focus until she isn't. And then, for a time, we get the world as seen through the eyes of a raccoon.

If memory serves, Franzen has much more narrative control by the time he gets to The Corrections and Freedom. He knows his characters and themes more clearly and balances those interests. Here, it feels unplanned, unless it's actually a hip, post-modern world showing a kind of contempt for conventional narrative structuring. We also see the same short-attention-span tendency in the themes. This novel reflects on environmental degradation, anti-choice militancy, the surprising reasonableness of evangelistic Christianity, and the plight of women in the business world. It would all be earnest except that it seems ironic, which only makes it seem more serious. Ah, the charms of elementary post-modernism.

I say all this with frustration because you can see many of the elements that make Franzen's later work so much more successful. He shows us a wide range of characters and perspectives. He engages with significant social issues. He is often funny and legitimately serious. I understand this novel has its big supporters, but I don't quite see it. Maybe it's just that some of our best writers get the chance to publish their just-past-juvenilia work and then have the opportunity to grow in the public eye with their later work. To be fair, little of it is as strong as Franzen at his strongest.

I truly dislike the random personification of raccoons. It seems rather inappropriate and perhaps a bit overdone at times.

Unfortunately, when looking at the overall context, that very section of random raccoon personification may have been the most interesting part.

It's a strange situation where something I don't really like manages to stand out as the most engaging aspect.

Maybe it's because it catches the eye with its unexpected nature, even though I have my reservations about it.

Nonetheless, it's a curious observation that makes me think about how our perceptions of what is interesting can sometimes be quite complex and at odds with our personal preferences.

Perhaps there are other elements in the article that could have been developed more to make them equally or even more interesting, without relying so much on the random raccoon personification.

But as it stands, that section remains a bit of a paradoxical highlight.

Achtung! This is quite a toxic read in parts. Jonathan Franzen's second opus is in many ways a precursor to both "The Corrections" and "Freedom." The broken environment is closely intertwined with JF's general theme of the broken family. The Holland clan not only destroys each other but also ruins the environment by dumping toxic waste in deep soil layers, provoking an earthquake that levels parts of Boston, including the family seat. Geologist Renée Seitchek is on the trail of the scandal and wins over family rebel Louis, who prefers to work for an underfunded local station rather than live off dirty money. Louis, whose academic career was cut short by unfounded rape accusations at his university in Houston, would rather work as an underpaid technician than engage in the family empire. However, the lost son's interest in uncovering the environmental scandal is more due to his sense of revenge against his mother/sister than his love for Renée or any journalistic ethos. JF denies his flawed hero the idealistic mantle and most readers the identification, especially when the love with Renée takes a rather violent turn.

Special Prize for Bad Sex. "Aha, a precursor of Chip," readers of "The Corrections" will say upon seeing certain parallels. But poor Louis also gets his share of Gary in the relationship department. Renée has his child aborted and thus becomes the target of militant anti-abortion activists who are not afraid to use firearms. But when it comes to love, everything must go exactly according to her will. And the argumentative geologist and passionate punk has no time for tenderness at all: "Renee took off her glasses and lay down beside him on the living room floor. When they kissed, he rubbed the bulging seam of her jeans between her legs, below the zipper." This demand for unconditional attention at the breakfast table is the only sublime moment in this relationship. But when Louis refuses to hit her a little or at least bite her, the withdrawal of love follows immediately. This kind of eroticism was probably not to every woman's taste, nor to mine. I am anything but a proponent of "clean romance," but with what goes on between the two in terms of mutual violence to get Madame going, I'm hardly surprised that they both don't suffer serious head injuries with each encounter. The scenes between Louis and Renée win the special prize for particularly bad sex for me, despite Peter Nadas' several hundred pages of continuous "long fuck."

Narcissistic Injuries and Ego Balm. Especially when certain motivational problems come into play. Instead of fighting for or with her man, the otherwise so argumentative feminist Renée lays down her weapons as soon as a younger woman appears and makes the man's eyes light up. Louis is in the middle of moving in with Renée when suddenly the old, unattainable love Lauren, who is eight years younger, stands at the door and wants to make up for her mistake. That is, in a therapeutic mission, she wants to take revenge for the accusations that sabotaged Louis' career. A misunderstanding with foreseeable consequences, because the compensation zone ends strictly above the belt. But when Louis returns to his new address, his suitcase with the dirty laundry is in front of Renée's front door. Apparently, the narcissistic injury was too great for Renée, who is programmed for full attention. In the second part, she is equally courted by Louis' mother Melanie and the spiritual leader of a pious group whose trust in God massively crosses the border into idiocy. Because the pious women and militant anti-abortion activists have settled in dilapidated houses in the worst earthquake zone. Since Pastor Philip Stites gets too involved with the woman who wants an abortion, his following runs amok. Renée, who has also made herself unpopular with the chemical giant, gets four bullets at the end of the second part.

The third part describes the prehistory from the time of the Indians. Franzen tries to connect the history of the settlement and exploitation of New England by the whites with the environmental scandal of Sweeting-Algren. The intertwined ecological and family catastrophe is the culmination of a severe earthquake. In this process, JF also pays a wonderful tribute to the American social novels of the first half of the 20th century. Especially successful is the segment with the story of the successful lawyer who marries into a ruined aristocratic family but is never fully accepted by the women, although he is the only breadwinner. He takes a rather perfidious revenge on the haughty and completely unfit-for-life ladies. The revenge story in the style of the era is brilliant. In olden times, JF even allows the exploited man a successful revenge. However, the lawyer also forged the evil chemical company that was supposed to develop, among other things, the infamous defoliants of the Vietnam War. The finale, on the other hand, is a really nasty bang-boom-pow. And of course, the lovers find each other again. The bullet scars function as a special aphrodisiac in the tenderest scene:

"Her pubic hair appeared to him as a thing of incredible beauty. (…) With all the fatty tissue exposed, the individual muscles on her arms and legs showed in their slender, fillet-like splendor. Her abdominal scar described a large circle of healed wound that started from a point below the breastbone and ran under the ribs to the spine. Whether it was appropriate or not, his bouncing penis became completely hard as he turned her body and followed the sinuous path of the scar, her purple and red runes, through her various zones. (…) He licked over the cool scar of the chest incision. He kissed the wildly jagged star of the exit wound under her right breast. A bullet had come out here and taken bone chips and parts of the lung tissue with it (…) She played with his penis, opened the ring of her thumb and index finger, and pulled the thick, clear secretion into threads..."

The whole scene stretches over more than two pages and remains as a final impression and a warning against a read that is quite toxic in parts. If someone absolutely needs a comparative evaluation to the bestseller, then I would even call "The Corrections" a step forward.

I can't believe how much I loved this book.

The main character, Louis Holland, might be one of the most despicable characters I've ever come across in fiction. Some people have called him "pathetic," and that's true, but more importantly, he is profoundly despicable and awful. It's like reading a book told from Joffrey's point of view. For the first one-hundred pages, I was downright angry whenever anything good happened to Louis or even when he managed to get by without anything exceptionally bad happening to him.

In other words, Franzen wrote the character masterfully.

But then, as the layers get peeled back, and almost predictably, the reader sees and feels the extent to which Louis is actually a giant ball of pain, hurt, and vulnerability.

The two other main characters, Renee and Eileen, were also done extremely well. As a character study of Renee alone, this book would have been nearly flawless. So much attention was paid to building this character's psychology and worldview.

Not to mention the fact that the book is deeply poignant and powerful. It's an engrossing story. Even when basically nothing was happening outright, the character development was so moving that I couldn't put it down. And there were many other times when the story was progressing steadily, and it was exciting to see where things would go next.

This book truly blew me away. It's a masterpiece that combines excellent character development, a captivating story, and profound themes to create an unforgettable reading experience.

I clearly perceive how this early piece of work manifested his latent potential.

Nevertheless, this particular work was more of a chore to engage with. It was burdened with an excessive amount of over stylized and rather incredulous plotting.

The conclusion was reached through ham handed and overly written characters, which detracted from the overall quality.

I managed to complete it out of a sense of respect. However, had it been the work of a lesser author, it would most certainly have been a Did Not Finish (DNF).

Despite its flaws, it is interesting to note how this early work hints at the potential that would later develop in the author's career.

Perhaps with more experience and refinement, the author would be able to overcome these initial shortcomings and produce truly remarkable works.

Nonetheless, this early effort serves as a reminder of the journey that lies ahead for the author in their pursuit of literary excellence.

Woah boy, this book is truly a jumble.

Let's take a closer look. The protagonist, Louis Holland, is a twenty-something from a prosperous Chicago family. He's now eking out a living as a radio technician for a Boston station that's about to be purchased by a pro-life evangelical, Philip Stites. His sister, Eileen, whom he doesn't particularly like as he deems her spoiled since she's "always" gotten her way with their parents, also resides in Boston. She's pursuing her MBA at Harvard and is dating (soon to be engaged and eventually married to) Peter, the son of a chemical corporation (Sweeting-Aldren) executive.

After a freak earthquake claims his grandmother's life, Louis meets Renée, a seismologist at Harvard studying the recent spate of seismic activity around Boston. After another encounter, Renée reluctantly agrees to attend a disaster-themed party at Eileen and Peter's apartment. There, she overhears a drunk Peter lambasting his father for Sweeting-Aldren's criminal pollution practices. Coincidentally, Sweeting-Aldren is the company in which Louis' mother, Melanie, has just received twenty-two million dollars' worth of stock from her now-deceased stepmother.

This piques Renée's curiosity about the possibility of forced seismicity explaining the unusual concentration of earthquakes in Eastern Massachusetts. So, she begins to investigate whether any of what Peter said is true. Meanwhile, Louis moves into Renée's apartment and unknowingly gets her pregnant. Then, an old pseudo-girlfriend from Texas shows up, declares her love for Louis, and convinces him to go out with her. Understandably, Renée's feelings are hurt, and she becomes self-destructive. She no longer hides her search for evidence that Sweeting-Aldren is surreptitiously pumping chemicals into secret mile-long wells north of Boston proper. This catches the attention of Sweeting-Aldren security thugs who first follow and then threaten her.

Now aware that she's pregnant, Renée visits an abortion clinic. Lo and behold, Reverend Stites' pro-life cadre is protesting outside. After getting her abortion, Renée, still in a self-destructive state, grabs a bullhorn and makes a speech about women's rights. Just after this, while walking home at night, Renée is shot in a drive-by. We all initially think it's the pro-lifers, but it's actually the Sweeting-Aldren thugs. Anyway, seeing this on the news, Louis comes around to try to help Renée, who gives him what he needs to implicate Sweeting-Aldren.

So, Louis, Peter, and Eileen go to Peter's parents' house to confront his father with the evidence. Then, the big one hits, and a bunch of Sweeting-Aldren's secret chemical stores blow up and are exposed. Renée recovers from her wounds, and she and Louis end up living together again. (And this already cumbersome synopsis is leaving out many details like Louis' undergraduate years at Rice, Renée's strange business deal with Melanie, Louis' father's academic background, fellow Harvard seismologist Howard Chun's biography, Renée's visit to Stites' church, and all the rest of the plot that was crammed into this very long novel.)

One thing to note here is the antagonism inherent in the relationships between these wealthy, college-educated, upper-middle-class children and their even wealthier parents. Similar to what we see in Burgess' Clockwork Orange or Salinger's Catcher, I tend to view this generational conflict in periodic terms. That is, it serves as a metaphor for a new literary period's vexed, difficult realization and differentiation from its established, aging parent. In the case of Strong Motion, it's not at all clear to me whether Franzen has a clear sense of what comes after postmodernism, as Wallace does in Infinite Jest. Nevertheless, Louis, Eileen, Peter, and Renée all strike me as the indignant, spoiled, not-quite-grown-up offspring of postmodernism, searching for something like love without any guidance because their parents were too busy ironically undermining social institutions, depleting the culture of affect, and getting divorced.

Teasing this out a bit further, we might also read the earthquakes as this periodic shift. It's a break from one cultural dominant to another, felt and represented as a paradigm "shift" or a "groundbreaking." Here again, the new ground of postpostmodernism isn't clearly defined in the text, at least for me. But in the moments when Louis is meditating on love, I see a glimmer of an idea. It's in these moments when he explicitly recognizes the vulnerability inherent in love and then claims to want to overcome his reflexive resistance to vulnerability to arrive at a disposition of faith inherent in the trust required for love. This is the New Sincerity all over. However, this isn't consistent. The moments in the novel where this occurs are sporadic, and so I find Strong Motion to be something like an evolutionary predecessor to better fiction to come. There are no memorable or even likable characters here, the plot is overwrought, the corporate conspiracy stuff is exactly the kind of thing Franzen doesn't do well, and it's too long. Which means that if this is for anyone, it's for Franzen completists and graduate students (and you can bet there's a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram).

I fuckin LOVE Jonathan Franzen.

This is his second novel, and it directly precedes The Corrections, which is a contender for my favorite book.

I often find reading early works by authors I really love to be underwhelming as they're still finding their voice. However, this novel was quite different from his later works.

I've heard that his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, is heavily influenced by Pynchon's conspiracy and DeLillo's social commentary. Strong Motion has elements of both, but it also weaves in the domestic storytelling that defines his later works.

Among his novels, I would rank this between Freedom and Purity.

Overall, it's a satisfying read. You feel like the $25 purchase price was well worth it. It's well written, with engaging characters and dialog.

A LOT of stuff happens in this book. Numerous plot lines are intertwined, and Franzen manages to neatly tie them up. It's an impressive feat in just 508 pages.

This novel showcases Franzen's growth as a writer and offers a unique reading experience.

I highly recommend it to fans of his work and those interested in contemporary literature.

Please provide the article that needs to be rewritten and expanded so that I can assist you further.

I reached page 235 and finally threw in the towel. It simply failed to capture my interest, and I couldn't have cared less about how the story would ultimately unfold.

Every single character and every situation was dissected and analyzed to an extent that was truly nauseating. It felt as if the author was trying to squeeze every possible ounce of meaning out of every little detail, leaving no room for the reader's imagination.

Instead of allowing the story to flow naturally and engage the reader on an emotional level, the over-analysis made it all seem forced and artificial. I found myself constantly skimming through the pages, hoping to find something that would spark my interest, but to no avail.

In the end, I had to admit defeat and move on to something else that could actually hold my attention.

The story is dense with intertwined narratives and a couple of climaxes that bring to the fore the contradictions of a modern American metropolis. Here, individuality, immediate material gain, and cheap pleasures find a comfortable space to thrive upon people who live this way simply because they are accustomed to it, as well as upon those who approach their lives as a business plan.

The story didn't require a happy ending. It was more about presenting the raw and complex reality of this urban environment. The characters, with their various motives and desires, added depth to the overall picture. Some were driven by the pursuit of wealth and status, while others were content with the simple pleasures that came their way. The city itself seemed to be a character, pulsating with life and energy, yet also harboring its own set of problems and inequalities.

Despite the lack of a traditional happy ending, the story left the reader with a sense of understanding and reflection. It made one question the values and priorities that govern our lives in such a fast-paced and materialistic world. Maybe, in the end, it's not about finding a happy ending, but rather about learning to navigate the complexities of life and finding meaning and purpose in the midst of it all.