One week and one book in....I think I may be falling behind

One week into the MS Novel Challenge and I already feel behind. I think this is partly because of the book I choose to read first, Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City.

As regular readers will know I read The Corrections early this year when I was overseas and found it brilliant. I also found that it was quite a fast read for its length. Unfortunately for me, The Twenty-Seventh City isn't so much of a quick read. Written in 1988, it was Franzen's first novel and while I loath the term as many of my favourite novels are first novels, it does have a clear case of first novel syndrome. Set in the late 1980s in St Louis, Missouri, it is the tale of the community response to the appointment of an Indian woman with no American police experience to the role of police commander in the city. It focuses largely on Martin Probst (a prominent industrialist in the city), his wife Barbara and their daughter Luisa. However unlike The Corrections with its focus on just one family, The Twenty-Seventh City is more expansive in its focus and there are large sections devoted to the police commander, S Jammu, and her associates, Singh, Asha and Devi, to around five other prominent members of the St Louis community and to a junior member of the St Louis police force. It is a tale of politics, corruption and a community at a loss to cope with change.

I found the sections about the Probst family and its troubles brilliant and a sign of things to come for Franzen but there were too many characters and they tend to pull focus. The number of characters made me feel at times like I was reading a Russian novel and I was just happy that, unlike a Russian novel, they didn't all have the same names or have three names that they went by. The number of characters felt like Franzen was testing the water in terms of what kind of fiction to write and where to place his focus. This slightly jilted focus also means that I found it less funny than The Corrections. However it is still worth the read and it shows the early stages of Franzen's brilliance. If you haven't read The Corrections (or, if what I hear is true, Freedom), it'd read this first as it is the comparison that makes it seem the lesser novel. Compared to the large percentage of fiction on the market, it is of a much higher quality.

 

Having finished with The Twenty-Seventh City, I'm embarking on a much shorter novel....albeit a less cheerful one....Cormac McCarthy's The Road....

If you still wish to chuck some sponsorship money my way, go to http://register.thenovelchallenge.org.au/The-Novel-Challenge/clarewoodley