Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

Jonathan Franzen

Strong Motion

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 1992

Cover design and illustration by Richard Bravery

Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint lyrics from the following songs: ‘I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass’, words & music by Nick Lowe, Andrew Bodnar & Stephen Goulding, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company; ‘Marie Provost’, words & music by Nick Lowe, BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company; ‘See No Evil’ (T. Verlaine), courtesy Hal Leonard Corporation.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9781841157498

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780007383238

Version: 2017-11-27

From the reviews of Strong Motion:

‘An affirmation of Mr Franzen’s fierce imagination and distinctive seriocomic voice’

New York Times Book Review

‘Ingeniously put together … His ear for American vernacular is flawless … His gift for description has a kinetic immediacy’

Seattle Times

‘Lyrical, dramatic and, above all, fearless … We’re in the presence of a great American moralist in the tradition of Dreiser, Twain, or Sinclair Lewis’

Philadelphia Inquirer

‘By sheer force of his imaginative writing and his unsheathed views of American life, Mr Franzen succeeds in joining together a love story, a family story, and a corporate-cum-environmental story … Distinctly original’

New York Times

‘Heartwrenchingly real characters … perfect pitch … Franzen’s almost-Boston is shimmeringly alive and palpable’

San Diego Union-Tribune

‘A young writer of exceptional skill and vision … insightful … dazzling to behold … a brave author, not afraid to take tremendous risks’

Orlando Sentinel

‘Complicated and absorbing with a fair mix of intrigue, social commentary, and humor laced with a tinge of malice’

Washington Times

‘With this work, Franzen confidently assumes a position as one of the brightest lights of American letters … Part thriller, part comedy of manners, Strong Motion is full of suspense’

Cleveland Plain Dealer

‘[Franzen] is a writer of almost frightening talent and promise’

Miami Herald

For Valerie

A rock was sticking out of the water, jagged and pointed, covered with moss—a remnant of the Ice Age and of the glacier that had once gouged out this basin in the earth. It had withstood the rains, the snows, the frost, the heat. It was afraid of no one. It did not need redemption, it had already been redeemed.

—I. B. SINGER

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

I Default Gender

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

II I ♥ Life

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

III Argilla Road

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

IV In the Black

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Acknowledgment

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Sometimes when people asked Eileen Holland if she had any brothers or sisters, she had to think for a moment.

In grade school she and her friends had played foursquare during recess, and when fights broke out in far corners of the playground, it usually turned out that the person whose face was being smashed into the blacktop was her younger brother, Louis. She and her friends would continue to bounce their ball from square to square. They were skipping rope the day Louis fought a boy on the top tier of the old tetanus-infested jungle gym and damaged a different part of himself on each of the pipes he hit during his fall, breaking off his front teeth on level three, bruising his ribs on level two, getting a concussion by impact and whiplash on level one, and stunning his diaphragm on the asphalt. Eileen’s friends ran to look at the possibly dead boy. She was left holding the jump rope and feeling as if she’d fallen and no one would help her.

Eileen was a faithful and pretty image of her mother, with astonished dark eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows, a high forehead and plump cheeks and straight dark hair. She had the limbs of a willow tree and sometimes she even swayed like one, with her eyes closed, when she was so happy to be among her friends that she forgot they were there.

Louis, like his father, was less ornamental. From the age of ten onward he wore aviator-style glasses whose metal frames vaguely matched his hair, which was curly and the color of old brass screws, and was thinning by the time he finished high school. His father had also donated a barrel chest to his genetics. In junior high and high school new friends of Eileen’s expected to be told, “No, no relation,” when they asked her if Louis Holland was her brother. To Eileen these questions were like vaccination shots. The soothing alcohol swab that followed was her friends’ avowal that her brother was not like her at all .

“Yeah,” she’d agree, “we’re real different.”

The young Hollands grew up in Evanston, Illinois, in the shadow of Northwestern University, which employed their father as a history professor. Once in a while, in the afternoon, Eileen caught sight of Louis in a booth at McDonald’s surrounded by the misfits he hung out with, their snide menu selections, their cigarettes and pasty faces and military clothing. The negativity emanating from his booth made her feel like she couldn’t wedge herself tightly enough between the elbows of her peers. She was, she told herself, very different from Louis. But she was never entirely safe from him. Even in the middle of a jammed and laughing back seat she would glance out a window just in time to see her brother striding along the trashy shoulder of some sixlane suburban thoroughfare, his white shirt gray with sweat, his glasses white with road glare. It always seemed that he was there for her alone to see, an apparition from that parallel private world which she herself had stopped living in when she started having friends but which Louis still obviously inhabited: the world where you were by yourself.

One day in the summer before she started college she suddenly needed to use the family car to see her boyfriend Judd, who lived farther up the Lake Michigan shore in Lake Forest. When Louis pointed out that he’d reserved the car a week earlier, she became furious with him, the way a person gets with an inanimate object that she keeps dropping and mishandling. Finally she made her mother go ask Louis to be selfless, just this once, and let her use the car to visit her boyfriend. When she got to Judd’s house she was still so furious that she left the keys in the ignition. The car was promptly stolen.