[In the following review of The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, Burn asserts that Franzen has refined the focus of his narratives from the broad cityscape of his first work to the narrower personal reflections of The Corrections.]

In Britain, Jonathan Franzen's career seems to be moving in reverse. The first of his works to be published here was his third novel, the National Book Award-winning The Corrections (2001). This was followed by How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of journalism that partly traced the genesis of that long novel, and now Fourth Estate are publishing his first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992). One of the effects of this reversal is to highlight unexpected continuities in his work. Readers who remember Chuck and Bea Meisner as the focus for Lambert envy in The Corrections, for example, will be surprised to find them as residents of St Louis in The Twenty-Seventh City. But, there are also larger, more important continuities. Coming to these novels after The Corrections heightens the reader's awareness of themes that were to become central to Franzen's breakthrough book: family tensions, the clash of the local and the national, and the consumerist emptiness of modern America are each explored in embryo form here.

The Twenty-Seventh City is a remarkably accomplished first novel whose labyrinthine plot anatomizes an imagined St Louis. Set in 1984, the novel records the decline of a city that was once America's fourth largest, to its rank of twenty-seventh, after “the Era of the Parking Lot, as acres of asphalt replaced half-vacant office buildings downtown”. Into this decaying cityscape Franzen inserts S. Jammu, a half-Indian female police chief and relative of Indira Gandhi (assassinated that year), who has just been brought over from Bombay. The energetic Jammu is trying to revitalize the city, but the depth of her ambition and the extreme nature of her methods offer a dark contrast to the sleepy Midwestern lives she disrupts. By kidnapping pets, stalking local families, and blowing up cars, Jammu tries to gain control of the minds of prominent citizens. This allows Franzen to attack what he sees as the lethargy of the modern American as he takes Jammu's attempts to break up the influential Probst family as an extended case study. But history has provided its own twist to this; Jammu's efforts to induce fear by controlled terror attacks read somewhat differently after the events of September 11, 2001.

The novel is composed of a mosaic of short sections that alternate between characters, and the paranoid surface of the plot recalls earlier novels by Thomas Pynchon and, especially, Don DeLillo. But Franzen has evidently anticipated this comparison, and his novel incorporates a number of asides that stress how little impact critically admired postmodernism has made on the general public. Early in the novel, for example, postmodern allusion gets confused with peer-group politics as two young characters talk:

“What are you, paranoid or something?” “Yeah. Paranoid.” He leaned back in the seat, reached out the open window, and adjusted the extra mirror. “My life's gotten kind of weird lately. … Do you know Thomas Pynchon?” “No”, Luisa said. “Do you know Stacy Montefusco?”

While he was writing this first novel Franzen made extra money working in a Harvard seismology lab, an experience he later drew on for Strong Motion, in which earthquakes operate as both plot device and organizing principle. “Strong Motion” is glossed in this novel as “a term for the ground shaking felt near an epicenter”, and while the novel locates its earthquakes in Boston, the characters themselves are found near the epicentre of social upheavals, becoming entangled in protests over environmentalism and reproductive rights. In this more personal book, the disturbances are largely found in the internal tensions of the Holland family—an uneasy parental combination of materialism and Marxism and their disaffected children—who inherit stock in a chemicals company after a relative is killed in an earthquake. The quake brings twenty-three-year-old Louis Holland into contact with an older seismologist, Renée Seitchek, with whom he begins a relationship. But love in this novel is complicated by seismology and economics when Renée begins to suspect that it is the waste-disposal policies of Louis's mother's company that is causing the earthquakes.

With the tighter concentration on one family, Strong Motion seems narrower than The Twenty-Seventh City, perhaps because Franzen was deliberately (as he told an interviewer) “going back and writing the coming-of-age story I hadn't written in the first book”. And this shift seems significant. While Franzen has described his career as an attempt to reverse some of the perceived excesses of postmodernism with his character-centred realism, it in fact reverses the traditional trajectory of a young novelist. Instead of starting with the clearly autobiographical, Franzen begins with the controlled impersonality of The Twenty-Seventh City's broad urban canvas, before moving to the closer focus of Strong Motion, and finally to the intensely personal material of The Corrections.