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25th Anniversary Edition
Picador Modern Classics
Published in 1988, Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City is the debut novel of a writer who would come to define our times.
St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. Set in mid-1980s, The Twenty-Seventh City predicts every unsettling shift in American life for the next two decades: suburban malaise, surveillance culture, domestic terrorism, paranoia. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.
- Sales Rank: #199458 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-11-05
- Released on: 2013-11-05
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Highly gifted first novelist Franzen has devised for himself an arduous proving ground in this ambitious, grand-scale thriller. Literate, sophisticated, funny, fast-paced, it's a virtuoso performance that does not quite succeed, but it will keep readers engrossed nonetheless. Bombay police commissioner S. Jammu, a member of a revolutionary cell of hazy but violent persuasion, contrives to become police chief of St. Louis. In a matter of months, she is the most powerful political force in the metropolis. Her ostensible agenda is the revival of St. Louis (once the nation's fourth-ranked city and now its 27th) through the reunification of its depressed inner city and affluent suburban country. But this is merely a front for a scheme to make a killing in real estate on behalf of her millionaire mother, a Bombay slumlord. Jammu identifies 12 influential men whose compliance is vital to achieving her ends and concentrates all the means at her disposal toward securing their cooperation. Eventually, the force of Jammu's will focuses on Martin Probst, one of St. Louis's most prominent citizens, and their fates become intertwined. Franzen is an accomplished stylist whose flexible, muscular, often sardonic prose seems spot-on in its rendition of dialogue, internal monologue and observation of the everyday minutiae of American manners. His imagination is prodigious, his scope sweeping; but in the end, he loses control of his material. Introducing an initially confusing superabundance of characters, he then allows some of them to fade out completely and others to become flat. The result is that, despite deft intercutting and some surprising twists at the end, the reader is not wholly satisfied. Any potential for greater resonance is left undeveloped, and this densely written work ends up as merely a bravura exercise. 40,000 copy first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPBC selections.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In the late 1980s, the city of St. Louis appoints as police chief an enigmatic young Indian woman named Jammu. Unbeknownst to her supporters, she is a dedicated terrorist. Standing alone against her is Martin Probst, builder of the famous Golden Arch of St. Louis. Jammu attempts first to isolate him, then seduce him to her side. This is a quirky novel, composed of wildly disparate elements. Franzen weaves graceful, affecting descriptions of the daily lives of the Probsts around a grotesque melodrama. The descriptive portions are almost lyrical, narrated in a minimalist prose, which contrasts well with the grand style of the melodramatic sections. The blend ultimately palls, however , and the murky plot grows murkier. Franzen takes many risks in his first novel; many, not all, work. Recommended. David Keymer, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Utica
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“A suspense story with the elements of a complex, multilayered psychological novel...Lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“A novel so imaginatively and expansively of our times that it seems ahead of them.” ―Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
trouble in the heartland
By A Customer
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.
43 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Entertaining, incisive, timely
By A Customer
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.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
nice prose, sloppy tale
By LK
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.
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