Product Description

The critically acclaimed second novel from the author of 'The Corrections'. Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of strange happenings -- earthquakes strike the city, and the first one kills his grandmother. During a bitter feud over the inheritance Louis falls in love with Renee Seitchek, a passionate and brilliant seismologist, whose discoveries about the origin of the earthquakes complicate everything.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1720622 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Louis Holland's father is a bemused left-wing historian, his mother a frustrated social-climber; his sister Eileen is a woman of picturesque self-absorption who takes off for business school in Boston. Louis, bespectacled, bland and prematurely balding, is a radio buff. A series of unrelated events--the mother's inheritance of $22 million, Louis's landing a radio job in Boston, among others--brings this commonplace, unhappy family together at the center of myriad transformations. "Strong motion" refers to the ground-shaking of earthquakes; mysteriously, Boston is being racked by them. As it turns out, the inherited money is tied up in a company that Louis's girlfriend Renee, a seismologist, suspects is causing the disturbances by injecting toxic waste into wells. In an accidental but fateful confrontation, Renee makes derogatory comments about an anti-abortion group's leader. The interweaving of women's reproductive rights issues with environmental disaster places the author (as well as the characters) on shaky ground. Such complicated themes, sounded against the backdrop of a lightly sketched Boston, seem poorly served by having one family heroically sort them out. After the stunning perfections of Franzen's first novel ( The Twenty-Seventh City ), this second effort is a paler achievement. Though his descriptive gifts are still in evidence, the plot becomes an all-too-obvious untying of a highly improbable knot.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
An earthquake that 23-year-old Louis Holland doesn't even feel shakes the Boston area and sets in motion a chain of events in this multilayered, metaphor-studded novel with a love story at its core. After Louis's step-grandmother is the quake's only fatality, his mother inherits millions in stock of chemical company Sweeting-Aldren, and Louis meets seismologist Renee Seitchek, who shares her bed and her theory with him. When tremors continue in the Northeast, scientists study fault lines, a fundamentalist anti-abortion minister credits God's wrath, and Renee suggests "induced seismicity" from Sweeting-Aldren's longtime secret pumping of industrial wastes into a deep well. Franzen ( The Twenty-Seventh City , LJ 11/1/88) may push an occasional metaphor too far, but distractions fade in the face of fine characterizations in a context of science grounded in history with well-integrated social messages and a subtext of the Boston Red Sox breaking fans' hearts. Impressive.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Franzen follows his widely acclaimed debut, The Twenty-seventh City (1988), with a potent saga of tentative love and environmental catastrophe that quakes and ultimately self-destructs, although it fragments into magnificent pieces in the process. The title, a technical term for ground shaking near the epicenter of an earthquake, comes into play as a series of shocks hits the coast north of Boston, the first of which supposedly kills young Louis Holland's crotchety grandmother. His family inherits millions as a result, but he has no access to it, even when he loses his job at a local radio station after a takeover by right- to-lifers. A bright patch in his otherwise bleak landscape is his girlfriend Ren‚e Seichek, a principled seismologist working at Harvard who connects the seismic activity with secret long-term dumping of a major chemical company's toxic waste into a deep well drilled on its property. Louis and Ren‚e split up when an old flame comes to visit him, however, and in her loneliness Ren‚e discovers she's pregnant, leading to a showdown between her and the fundamentalists picketing her abortion clinic. When she's mysteriously shot and critically wounded immediately afterward, Louis nurses her to health even as a final quake causes widespread damage, utterly destroying the chemical plant in a moment of sweet if heavy-handed poetic justice. Unfortunately, the dichotomies between romance and science, abortion and the environment are unresolved, and the self-pity in Louis's nihilism as he rails against mother, father, sister, the world, and himself makes him a cold and distant protagonist. A brooding tale of personal responsibility and dangerous legacies that's ambitious and impressive but finally overreaches itself. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Ambitious, experimental, messy
I read Strong Motion after reading Franzen's excellent The Corrections, a much more complete novel that is superior to this one in almost every aspect. That said, there is a lot to like in Strong Motion.

Louis Holland is a complex and well defined character; he's not completely likeable, but the reader ends up caring about him despite his shortcomings. His introspectiveness perpetuates his isolation and strains his relationships with those around him - his parents, sister, and romantic interests. The one person that he does make an effort to extend himself to rejects him so completely that he sleepwalks though the one subsequent relationship that might have had the potential to have made him happy.

The plot is based on some premises that I found a bit difficult to swallow (large-scale seismic activity prompted by pumping waste into deepwater wells?), but if you can suspend your disbelief in the concept of a big evil corporation trying to cut costs and inadvertently moving around tectonic plates then the plot does a nice job in steering big business, academia, and religious fundamentalists on a collision course.

The novel often feels quite experimental. At one point we're looking at the world from the vantage point of a solitary raccoon, whose superior intelligence doesn't quite make up for the fact that he doesn't move in a pack like other night creatures - dogs and rats (the raccoon might mirror the man-in-isolation Louis Holland character). At another point we look through the eyes of a computer program. Emotions fly as earthquakes toss characters around. All of this is interesting and masterfully written, but some of it ends up being fairly extraneous to the heart of the novel.

This is an ambitious, structurally messy novel - but with flashes of brilliance. I could have just as easily given it four stars. Recommended.

Ground Shaking
I just finished this book yesterday and I must say that it's going on my top ten favorite books list.
I picked up Strong Motion because I'd heard about Jonathan Franzen through some fans of David Foster Wallace. I was not dissapointed. I'll skip the plot synopsis, since I've noticed that it has been done already, but I'll tell you what I loved about the book.
Scenery. The book is set in Massachusetts -- mostly in Boston and its surrounding areas. I grew up just south of Boston, so the territory was familiar to me. Franzen really made me feel like I was back in that city, walking its streets, taking the train around. Many authors can write about being in the city, but few can really capture the feeling of a specific city like Franzen does for Boston. I really like that.
Characters. Franzen creates some of the most memorable character I've ever read. Not for their quirkiness (a la Dickens) but more in the way that it is easy to see yourself in them. In Strong Motion, I was able to see some of my own qualities in both Louis and Rene and it gives the book a kind of intimacy.
Details. There is a lot of detail in Strong Motion. I learned a lot about earthquakes and chemicals while reading the book. Franzen's skill, however, is integrating the technical details with the storyline, making the two fit together seamlessly. I never thought "ok, here we go with more technical stuff...".
I really loved this book and I'd suggest it to anyone who enjoyed Franzen's The Corrections (which I also loved) or even David Foster Wallace, Don Delillo or Paula Fox. I found myself very involved in the story (which hits on abortions, earthquakes, sex, love, family, religious zeal and more). Do yourself a favor and read this book.

Does the earth move for you?
Great things about this novel include:

- The central idea -- both the concept of earthquakes in the Boston area, and the concept of how they might have been caused.
- The writing -- full of brilliant images, razor-sharp observation, and humanity. Franzen is the only novelist I know whose characters have the real-life habit of ending sentences with "so", as in "Well, he's coming in tomorrow, so." Other reviewers have commented on the raccoon sequence, which is affecting and unforgettable.
- The setting -- if Boston were destroyed in an earthquake, you could reconstruct it from the description given in the book.
- The social conscience -- in particular, the sequence about the effects of the settlers on New England stands out.
- And the gutsiness of having a character who's a militant anti-abortionist with a heart of gold.

The weaknesses:
- The main characters aren't entirely likeable. This applies particularly to the female characters; Louis's mother Melanie is an ogre, his sister Eileen is a spoiled idiot, his Texan girlfriend Lauren is just an annoyance. Even Renee, the main female character, is curiously static; Louis develops far more as the book goes on.
- It's such a big, ambitious book, and yet a small number of main characters are linked into all the plots. In particular, it seems contrived that Eileen's boyfriend Peter has a direct family link into the vast conspiracy.

The weaknesses -- in particular, the events leading up to Louis and Renee's separation halfway through the book -- made me so impatient that I actually gave up reading it for a while. But I'm very glad I returned to it. A lot of the most memorable passages are in the second half, there's a great sense of gathering apocalypse and all the pleasures of a well-constructed thriller, and it ends on an emotional high that prefigures, but doesn't quite match, that at the end of The Corrections. Definitely worth a read, particularly if (by sheer coincidence) you live on the same street as the hero...