Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Thriller
Pages: 508
I learned the name of Jonathan Franzen through reading biographies of David Foster Wallace. I swear I had no idea about Freedom, Oprah or Times Magazine practically blowing him. In front of that tidal wave of affection from the sympathetic literary glasses wearing writer, I found myself in front of a well known challenge. He definitively interested me, but how could I read him without being a simple bandwagonner or a hipster twat that decries bandwagoners himself? I decided then to read Strong Motion, his second, not so obscure but not so prized novel. In the long run, it proved to be an excellent choice.
Strong Motion is the story of the Holland family, but mostly of their youngest son Louie. Not naturally endowed by beauty or charisma, his life revolves then around the idea of being the best person he can and the most different from his family. He doesn't get along with them, but Franzen as a good writer should do, doesn't tell you that, but he rather shows it through a life changing event. An Earthquake kills his grandmother by alliance Ruth Kernaghan and his mother (who had a rather fragile psyche) inherits 22 million dollars from the grandfather's stock in the petrochemical giant Sweeting-Aldren. The Hollands, like most not-so-happy families start feuding violently over the money. Melanie wants to hold on to it and resume unchanged relationship with her children, but the kids would like their lives to change also.
After a violent quarrel where Louie destroys his mother's furniture and runs away to a beach, he finds a team of Harvard seismologists looking for evidence of a Earthquake that just happened (see where I'm going with this?). Over there, Louie meets Renée, a brilliant and passionnate girl, who seems are tainted and damaged as he is by life. They start dating eventually (I won't spoil you the process) and Renée, having the undying drive of exceptional people, finds what caused the Earthquake...and the explanation makes no one feel better about themselves.
Franzen has obviously a god given talent with the description and storytelling of family life. Despite that the Hollands are dealing a lot in symoblism of his own preoccupations (notably greed and responsability), they have a life. Memory, regrets, incidents, accidents...what maimed them shaped them, like Dennis Lehane would say. And it's not pretty. Melanie Holland has became the embodiment of the poisonnous gift she received and she refuses to split it if it would break her very identity. I found myself very attached to the character of Louie Holland who never had a break, despite being relatively story-less. He's that kid who compensated with a vengeance by wit, intellect and rationality when he was in high school and never found an exit to that troubling time. In graceful accuracy and modesty, Franzen let his story shape his characters and let the best in them shine in the darkest hour. The last hundred pages of Strong Motion almost brought me to tears from its maestria.
Strong Motion is brilliant, but it's not a perfect novel by any means. Jonathan Franzen's voice is somewhat obstrusive, especially during the first two hundred pages where he's rooting for Louie very hard and it's getting in the way of character development quite a bit. But like any good writer, he knows when to back off. He did just in time to let the Holland family take control over their fate. A second critic (more universal among readers) is that it's pretty derivative. As I can applause the seismology research and scientific accuracy, the works of Renée Seitcheck doesn't have much appeal to them, despite being relevant to the story. Franzen has a way to dig and be thorough about every character, which can end up being confusing and lenghty. I'm looking here at Bob Holland (Louie's dad) only monologue, who's a whopping 37 pages long.
While it's not perfect, Strong Motion is still a great read. There are signs of big emotional involvement from the writer, but Jonathan Franzen really knows what's good for his story and what harms it. Ultimately, he takes the right decisions, which makes for a terrific novel. I have high expectations for his following works. Gee, consider me a Franzenite! I took a side after all.
