The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

Book Overview

The debut novel of New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City is "a startling, scathing first novel about American ambition, power, politics, money, corruption and apathy" (People).

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 125004670X
• ISBN13: 9781250046703
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Franzen should have stopped with this one

This is Franzen's best book.

A great book, far ahead of its time

I'm not sure whether the other reviewers were reading the same book! The 27th City is both funny, enjoyable to read, and also prescient -- Franzen essentially provides a look at "outsourcing" long before that became a hot topic, except that what's being outsourced to India is the police, corruption, and local politics! Sound confusing and unfamiliar? Sure. But what really good literature doesn't defamiliarize our surroundings? Read the first chapter and you will be hooked. Frazen's premise is tremendously original. This is basically a more readable version of DeLillo's use of surreal plots to comment on very real problems, with a lot of dark humor thrown in to sweeten the p(l)ot.

Witty commentary on modern American politics and society

What started off as a simple conspiracy-theory book evolved quickly into an interesting work about city politics and human interactions. The way Franzen's "perfect family" collapsed with just a slight nudge was disturbing, but amazingly realistic (although the Jammu-Probst love affair seemed a little contrived). Here's hoping that more than rain and voter apathy defeat the real-life power mongers.This was a fairly quick and interesting read, thought-provoking and thorough. Five out of five stars.

trouble in the heartland

This was one of those books that kept me up at night. The story was very involving and Franzen's technique of alternating narrative perspectives among a large cast drew me on. I would look at the first line of the next chapter or sub-asterisk and feel compelled to find out what was going on with that character.I live in a city that is smaller than St. Louis, but the social stratication, economic segregation, and political altercations were all quite familiar. I was not particularly surprised to read the disbelieving reaction of a reviewer from St. Louis ("this is not my town!"). Franzen pre-zinged her by building up to an election that no one apparently cared about. You spend first 7/8 of the book being led to believe that the whole city is in an uproar about the "reign" of S. Jammu, only to have the election show that the county/city consolidation issue was only of interest to the players and to the media who were hyping it. No one else was paying any attention.This is a wickedly funny book, both in the way it deploys broad comic themes like the one above and also in little zingers aimed at various social groups. Franzen aims most of his barbs at what is presumably his own social milieu: the white suburban uppermiddle to upper class. But he has some left over for the black middle class and Indian socialists.As has been stated by other reviewers, Franzen is primarily a story teller and secondarily a stylist. There are, however, similarities between this book and D.F. Wallace's Infinite Jest. One obvious similarity is the epic scope. Another is the multi-personal narrative. The scathingly critical and borderline cynical perspective on politics. The recurrent dwelling upon the details of substance abuse (although Wallace is much more obsessive). The selection of an unlikely ethnic group as the source of an anti-American conspiracy. The occasional passages of pure hallucinogenic description.That Franzen wrote this book in the 80s is impressive. He saw a lot of stuff coming and yet a lot of the details of the book are charmingly dated (e.g., Probst's delight in the novelty of using a phone in a car). I found myself wondering what the (surviving) characters were up to today. I visited St. Louis in 1990 and found the downtown to be a sad and lifeless place (including the Disneyfication of Laclede's Landing). I hope the 90s were good to it.

Entertaining, incisive, timely

I must say that I am very surprised by the several lackluster reviews this book received here, which is why I am anxious to add my own glowing endorsement. THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY is one of the most incisive and visionary novels about the strata of American society published in the past 15 years. It brings to life the economic, political, racial, and personal forces behind urban reform more vividly, and humorously, than any other contemporary fiction of which I know. Its investigations of gentrification in St. Louis, and of the incessant struggles and backstabbing between the city's power elite, seem to become more timely and topical with each passing day, at least if the present courses of so many American cities (including my own) are any indication. The fact that Franzen wrote the book in the Eighties, and that he centers its events on a wicked satire of nearly implausible foreign conspiracy and much-too-real American paranoia, only add to my admiration of it. As for Franzen's writing, I want to say that I don't think his style is any less 'brilliant' than that of his contemporaries; he just isn't compelled to suspend the novel's progress and tap us on the shoulder every time he is about to perform a stylistic trick. That is not to say that the tricks aren't still there. So much the better for the astute reader anyway, because here you will find consistently strong, funny, and surprising writing that advances the book's story and characters throughout. It's a read that amazingly satisfies our desires for entertainment and intellectual stimulation simultaneously.

Audacity! Humor! Intellect!

I have never been to St. Louis, but Franzen's depiction of big-city decline, desperation and corruption is familiar (and compelling) to anyone who lives in an aging city in the country's old industrial belt. Franzen's audacity and confidence in sticking to this odd plot is stunning. The book is one of the funniest I have read in some time, and one of the smartest.