[In the following review of The Twenty-Seventh City, Slung praises Franzen's writing, contending that the author has “an original voice.”]

As one plunges into this unsettling and visionary first novel [The Twenty-Seventh City], it's hard not to be infected by the author's own confidence. For much of the book, one simply forgets that Jonathan Franzen is a very young man, that this is a beginner's effort, and that the lifelike setting is, in fact, an alternate reality.

The “twenty-seventh city” is St. Louis, Missouri, a once thriving Mississippi River port, now—the time is 1984—a place of little interest to anyone farther east than Illinois or farther west than Kansas. “What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St. Louis knew. Its fate was sealed within it, its special tragedy special nowhere else.”

Yet, as Franzen imagines it, there is a group of extraordinarily unlikely people who are interested in the present and future of St. Louis, people who have their own sinister agenda for the faded and vulnerable metropolis. Who are these sinister conspirators? Well, in a stroke of fictional casting kept only by the strength of Franzen's authorial will from toppling into jarring outlandishness, they are all Indians. And they are following the orders of the controversial and charismatic S. Jammu, late of the Bombay police force.

More peculiar, even, are these facts: that the S. stands for Susan, that she is the recently appointed St. Louis chief of police, and that, though an American citizen, she's a cousin of Indira Gandhi, with no small amount of that consummate politician's ruthlessness in her blood. Still, it would be one thing if only a single newly arrived Indian were making St. Louisans sit up and take notice, but there are others, as well, suddenly on the scene.

The heir to a local brewing fortune makes headlines when he forsakes the suburban St. Louis debutantes and marries, instead, a Bombay aristocrat. Indian families are sighted on parking lots squatting around portable stoves dishing up curried stews; they also can be found doing more ordinary things, like shopping for real estate and worrying about stalled cars on the parkway.

But the Indians to watch are the ones who can't be seen: Jammu's spies and operatives who are insinuating themselves into the private lives of St. Louis most prominent citizens, tapping their phone lines, examining their drawers and closets, learning their weaknesses in order to exploit them.

Certainly, “why?” would be a reasonable question; what goal does Jammu mean to achieve? Franzen, however, teasingly keeps this crucial information just beyond our grasp. Does she seek the subversion of the St. Louis power structure as a result of radical ideology, or for financial gain, or is it “simple” megalomania? Yet bothersome as that missing revelation is, the book is so busy that it's possible to do as Jammu herself does—just go ahead and let the machinations of intrigue take precedence.

“What she would do when she ‘had’ them, when she had cured the city's ills and risen above her role in the police department to become the Madam of Mound City, she wouldn't say. Right now she was concerned only with the means.” Like Mrs. Gandhi, whose assassination is not without meaning in this book, Jammu is convinced that she knows what's best for the populace for which she bears the responsibility, and any extralegal methods stimulate rather than trouble her.

Where things get truly creepy is when we are introduced to the concept of the “State,” the guiding principle behind the activity of Jammu and her henchmen. After the “State” is induced in an unsuspecting subject, that person's “everyday consciousness becomes severely limited.”

What this means is that Jammu's team must work to keep a victim, i.e., any opponent, off balance by applying a variety of methods, yet the area of attack must always be consistent with what careful research has revealed of the target's personality. “She'd taken, liberals and made them guilt-stricken, taken bigots and turned them paranoid.”

Tax audits, pet murder, car bombs (when the vehicle is empty), anything from turning a social drinker into an alcoholic or rendering a sexual libertine impotent can create the “State.” Frequently, though, “the leverage consisted of little more than the subject's susceptibility to [Jammu's own] charm.” And, thus, enemies are reborn as allies.

Franzen juxtaposes the increasingly disordered lives of a number of St. Louis citizens with the increasingly out-of-control plotting of Jammu whose obsession with the ostensibly incorruptible Martin Probst, builder of the Arch—the city's landmark of civic pride—will undo her. Her omnipotence begins to unravel; events slide out of her control. And, at last, Franzen's mastery of his multi-layered narrative breaks down to reveal the odd misstep and those places where his confidence no longer is good enough to serve as the safety net under our disbelief.

Most definitely, The Twenty-Seventh City is not a novel that can be quickly dismissed or easily forgotten: it has elements of both “Great” and “American.” At moments, too, it made me feel that I'd encountered the odd Updike character coming to grips with a Pynchonesque landscape. (For example, Martin and Barbara Probst are a sort of Couples couple, while General Sam Norris, who suspects the worst of Jammu and is spying on her spies, would be at home in V. or The Crying of Lot 49.)

But, in the end, it's very much its own creation and Franzen, with his flavorful, punched-out writing, can safely be called an original voice. His virtue and simultaneous vice is that he seems always to be thinking—he's as manipulative as Jammu—and, occasionally, The Twenty-Seventh City suffers from it. But never enough to keep us from admiring his accomplishment; it's a book of memorable characters, surprising situations, and provocative ideas.