The Twenty-Seventh City

Day 6 of our plague inspired lockdown. I have forgotten to mention we got our soap dispensers filled this past Tuesday or Wednesday. Several are again empty. I have been working on "Stacy Goes East" for "no Clean Slates" and the second draft is pretty good - good enough not to embarrass myself on front of the group, even if I do think I'm overburdening my story with crass connections. 

I finished Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City (1988; Picador)  which left me even more uncertain about Jonathan Franzen. [Since I am not posting my journal in chronological order let me say that my reading of Franzen's novels left unimpressed with those novels.] 

Indulge me on discussing plot. A group of Indian (as in Mumbai - which Franzen calls Bombay) come to St. Louis, Missouri to subvert its political structure. So maybe it is a political thriller. Their opponent is an upright citizen named Martin Probst. Real estate seems to underlie the Indian's political subversion. Then crops up the kidnapping, brainwashing, and eventually senseless death of Martin Probst's wife by one of the Indians. Franzen kept my interest until the ending which felt not so much like a conclusion but more like a car running out of gas. I still do not understand the cachet Franzen has. [While typing up this note I found a review here that makes me feel a whole lot less lonely.]

What I have found annoying about Franzen (especially The Corrections) is his denigrating Midwesterners as rubes at the expense of civilized Easterners. He does not do that in this novel, which from what I can see listed here may be his first. No, what confounds me is the death of Probst's wife which nullifies the whole conspiracy plot.

Could be the whole point is here - which is a swerve from the rest of the novel's plot:

Enlighted Americans accepted the world as it came. They were willing to pay a high price for the food they ate - dense buttery ice creams, fresh pastsas,chocolatre truffles, boneless chicken breasts - because high-quality foods went down easily,leaving the mind free for morephiliosophicalkpursutis. By the same token, sexual promiscuity was passing out of fashion. The threat of AIDS ensured that the spirit would no longer be a slave to the passions...The new generation had renounced the world in return for simplicity and self-sufficiency. Nirvana beckoned.

p. 504; Chapter 24 

That's not how I recall 1984/85 (the period covered by the novel). I mostly recall people trying to just pay their bills. And sexyual promiscuity tookthetimetoput onacondom. 

Still,that'ssome fine writign.I do not recommend overlooking the novel if you think where you want to place your novel doesn't have the heft of Brooklyn or Dublin or Paris. If Franzen could start with Saint Louis,Missouri, then what's wrong with your location?

Lesson: it's not the location that matters, it ist he writing.

sch

3/30/20