Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

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Strong Motion : A Novel: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Jonathan Franzen is the author of three novels: The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper’s. In Strong Motion, Louis Holland arrives in Boston in a spring of ecological upheaval (a rash of earthquakes on the North Shore) and odd luck: the first earthquake kills his grandmother. Louis tries to maintain his independence, but falls in love with a Harvard seismologist whose discoveries about the earthquakes’ cause complicate everything.
“Bold, layered. Mr. Franzen lavishes vigorous, expansive prose not only on the big moments of sexual and emotional upheaval, but also on various sideshows and subthemes. An affirmation of Franzen’s fierce imagination and distinctive seriocomic voice. his will be a career to watch.”
— Josh Rubins, "Ingenious. Strong Motion is more than a novel with a compelling plot and a genuine romance (complete with hghly charged love scenes); Franzen also writes a fluid prose that registers the observations of his wickedly sharp eye.”
— Douglas Seibold, “Complicated and absorbing with a fair mix of intrigue, social commentary and humor laced with a tinge of malice.”
— Anne Gowen, “Strong Motion is a roller coaster thriller. Franzen captures with unnerving exactness what it feels like to be young, disaffected and outside mainstream America. There is an uncannily perceptive emotional truth to this book, and it strikes with the flinty anger of an early-sixties protest song.”
— Will Dana, “Franzen is one of the most extraordinary writers around. Strong Motion shows all the brilliance of The Twenty-Seventh City.”
— Laura Shapiro, “Lyrical, dramatic and, above all, fearless. Reading Strong Motion, one is not in the hands of a writer as a fine jeweler or a simple storyteller. Rather, we’re in the presence of a great American moralist in the tradition of Dreiser, Twain or Sinclair Lewis.”
— Ephraim Paul, “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.”
— Alicia Metcalf Miller, “Wry, meticulously realistic, and good.”
— “Franzen’s dark vision of an ailing society has the same power as Don DeLillo’s, but less of the numbing pessimism.”
— “Base and startling as a right to the jaw. [Franzen] is a writer of almost frightening talent and promise.”
— Margaria Fichtner,

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“I’m hearing an issue with the place-names.”

“It’s cheap, I know. But there’s something about the place. a coldness, an ugliness. I mean every week there’s some incredibly twisted crime here. And somehow all the people who think Boston’s a center of culture and education manage to ignore it. They see this cute, manageable, safe city, you know, that’s not as scary as New York. It’s like New York, only better. But I look and I see overt racism and a rotten climate and elevated cancer rates and bad drivers and a harbor full of sewage, and I see all these young mothers with their Saabs in Cambridge blissing out on being in Cambridge, and who wouldn’t be revolted?”

Louis was laughing.

“You laugh,” Renée said. “It’s obviously a problem I have. I always wanted to live here. But then I found out that the part of me that made this place attractive, the part of me I shared with the other people who actively wanted to be here, was not a part of me that I liked anymore. And the fact that I’m still here after six years is this ghastly reminder of something about myself I wish I’d forgotten six years ago. I feel so implicated. People come here and soak up the experience for a few years and then they move away to real places, and all their lives they talk about this romantic time they had in a city they were too young to notice wasn’t much, and the whole country buys this image of Boston as a fun town, and what’s sickening is that Boston itself buys it more than anybody. And after six years it’s assumed that I buy it too.”

“Why don’t you get out of here?”

“I am, in September. First I had to get a degree, though.” Louis was looking up at house numbers on a street called Marlborough.

“Besides, I hate the idea of the place more than the place itself. And I don’t hate Somerville at all. Perversely. What’s the number we’re looking for?”

“This one here,” he said, pointing at a brick town house. He had only this moment realized that parking might be a problem. In the next twenty-five minutes he and Renée passed the Peter Stoorhuys residence eight times. Traffic was heavy and abnormal, the cars creeping through the gentrified grid in an inverse cakewalk, everyone waiting for a space to open up. Louis spiraled farther and farther away from Peter’s house. He ignored spaces that seemed too distant, and then when he returned to them with a more informed idea of their value, they were filled. (It was like learning the hard way how to time stock purchases.) He tried backing into spaces that he knew were too small. He slammed on the brakes for hydrants and then floored the gas pedal. He ran red lights. And when, closer to ten o’clock than to nine, he found an empty spot one block from Peter’s house, he was almost too suspicious to take it. Three cars ahead of him had passed it with the blitheness of insiders. There didn’t seem to be a hydrant or a driveway or a resident permit only sign, and the space must just have opened up, but somehow it didn’t seem fresh . He backed in, frowning warily, as a tiger in the forest might if it ran across a raw beef roast on a sheet of waxed paper. His hips were wet with runoff from his armpits.

“Looked like a nice party in there.”

“This sucks. This sucks.”

At the door of the first-floor apartment he put his costume on. It was the dust mask he’d worn in high school for cutting grass in dry weather. It had two protruding snout-like vents that he still had some paper filters for. “That’s very. off-putting,” Renée said.

“Thank you.”

Eileen came to the door with a bottle of beer. She had her hair pinned up and was wearing a man’s double-knit plaid suit and a fat pumpkin-colored necktie. Her cheeks were flushed. “Is that you , Louis?” From her tone you might have gathered he was six years old. She smiled tentatively at Renée.

“This is my sister, Eileen,” Louis huffed, pointing at her with his left-side snout. Renée finished the introduction herself, and Eileen turned on a frantic superficiality worthy of a woman twice her age. She hovered by the newcomers, explaining the party and pointing out the available pleasures. Louis noticed that Peter owned a sofa and a coffee table identical to the ones in her apartment. In the high-ceilinged living room, which had the stark soffits and smooth walls of a recent rehab, about half the guests were in costume. The prizewinner was an individual in a Mylar suit complete with a reflector visor, a hard hat, and a pendular air-filtration system that put Louis’s to shame. Surrounding this figure was a group of young men in weekend-wear. From the basking movements of its head it appeared to be receiving their ongoing congratulations. Good friends of hers from school, Eileen explained. Another good friend of hers sat by the stereo equipment with his arm draped over the top component, his fingers on a control knob, his head nodding to the beat of tinny reggae in a major key. His other arm was in a sling. In the center of the room, a herd of young women with execu-clipped hair were raising and lowering their feet in the kind of semiconscious dancing a person does on too-hot sand. Some wore bandages on various body parts; all wore drop-waisted dresses. “What’s your costume?” Louis asked Eileen.

“Can’t you guess?

“Small businessman with heavy losses.”

She gave him an anguished look. “I’m an insurance adjusterrr- rrr! You see my tape measure, my notepad, my calculator—” She stopped. She looked just like a cat that had suddenly become aware of being watched. She retracted her head a little and her eyes moved back and forth between Louis and Renée, who were standing two feet apart and paying careful attention to her. One thing was she’d never seen her brother with a female escort.

There was an oddly compassionate note in Renée’s voice. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Eileen becoming flustered. “Just an adjuster, ’surance injuster. There’s lots and lots of food, so. Help yourself.”

Renée looked on with even more noticeable compassion as Eileen burrowed through the group of dancing women, who two by two glanced over their shoulders at the newcomers. Before they could venture further into the party, an ugly thing happened.

The figure in the Mylar suit was approaching them, doing a lunar-gravity thing. They tried to ignore it, but it stepped between them and peered up through its shiny visor into Louis’s face. He saw a masked, bronze-toned image of unamusement. The figure’s retinue of friends looked on in suspense and delight as it contorted its limbs in elaborate slow motion and peered up into Renée’s face. It touched Louis’s head with kinked rubber fingers. It touched Renée’s ear, robotic squeaks and clicks emerging from its vents. Its friends were cracking up. Louis was afraid Renée was going to joke along with it, be “weird” in return, but she remained stonefaced. When the figure again made so bold as to touch Louis’s head, he caught hold of its wrist and looked down his nose and squeezed through the rubber glove until he heard a squeal of pain inside the headgear.

“Shit!” the figure accused in a muted voice, retreating towards its friends. The friends weren’t laughing anymore. One forty-year-old twenty-two-year-old in green pants detached himself from the group. With terrible, paternal maturity he said to Louis, “We’re dealing with a rented suit here, dude.”

“We’re dealing with an asshole. Dude.”

“Yeah, and I kinda think it’s you.”

Louis smiled inside his mask, pleasantly out of control. “Wooo-ee.”

“Let’s not be stupid,” Renée interposed. “Your man in the suit here started this.”

The enemy had enough control of himself to generalize. “I guess some people can’t take a joke.”

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