Politics and Social Conflict in
a Mythical St. Louis
By
MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of The Times
The
Twenty-Seventh City By Jonathan Franzen 517 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
$19.95.
The 27th city in Jonathan Franzen's wildly
ambitious first novel is named St. Louis. But while this St. Louis bears a
certain resemblance to the Missouri city that is perched on the banks of the
Mississippi, it's really a mythical place, a supercharged symbol of all-American
dreams, values and problems - a 1980's, urbanized version of such fictional
Midwestern towns as Zenith or Gopher Prairie. It provides the backdrop for Mr.
Franzen's spawling epic about political conspiracy and social conflict in
America today.
At the center of ''The Twenty-Seventh
City'' is a good citizen by the name of Martin Probst, an honorable, slightly
prissy fellow who helped get the famous Gateway Arch constructed and who now
presides over the influential Municipal Growth committee. Martin lives with his
lovely wife, Barbara, and their lovely daughter, Luisa, in the lovely
neighborhood of Webster Groves, ''an area where Christmas can occur in
safety,'' a community where ''the air is full of woodsmoke, but the sky is
clear.''
Writing in rich, full-bodied prose that
shifts gears effortlessly between naturalism and a more heightened, satiric
style, Mr. Franzen gives us a freewheeling sense of what the Probsts' lives are
like there in Webster Groves: Martin and Barbara's placid domestic routines;
Luisa's deliberations over college applications and her flirtation with a boy
named Duane. Like Tom Wolfe's ''Bonfire of the Vanities,'' however, ''The
Twenty-Seventh City'' does not confine itself to one social class, one easily
defined world; rather, the narrative roams about the entire city, giving us
brisk, if somewhat parodic, portraits of a cross section of St. Louis society.
There's Martin's philandering
brother-in-law, Rolf Ripley, who's carrying on an affair with a heroin addict
named Devi; Cleon Toussaint, a notorious slumlord who's rapidly buying up real
estate with money from an unknown source; Jack DuChamp, a down-on-his-luck J.
C. Penney employee; Pete Wesley, St. Louis's obsequious mayor, and General
Norris, a businessman whose ''personal wealth and extreme political views were
almost mythical in magnitude.''
This time, General Norris, who's usually
carrying on about the Soviet threat, contends there is a conspiracy, led by a
woman from India, ''to subvert the government of St. Louis.'' And, as it turns
out, there is a conspiracy afoot. A tough young woman named Jammu, who rose to
power in Bombay during the crackdown on civil rights known as the Emergency,
has recently been named chief of police in St. Louis, and she apparently wants
to gain further influence by orchestrating an elaborate scam involving
complicated real estate transactions and the manipulation of public opinion.
Jammu has recruited a record number of
blacks to the police force, and she has already gained remarkable popularity
within the inner city: ghetto kids have taken to wearing tank tops stenciled
with her image and styling their hair in a ''Jammuji.'' This popularity has
been enhanced in the city at large by Jammu's impressive record in thwarting
violent crime, including her put-down of several terrorist incidents -
incidents she secretly helped stage to further her career. Among Jammu's
co-conspirators are Asha, an Indian beauty who has seduced and married Sidney
Hammaker, president of the Hammaker Brewing Company, the city's flagship
industry, and Singh, her one-time lover, ''a marxist of the aesthetic variety,
attracted to the notion of exportable revolution at least partly because
Continental stylishness was exported along with it.''
Though General Norris and his buddies are
already on to some of her activities, Jammu doesn't seem terribly worried. She
has been careful about destroying evidence, and she knows, writes Mr. Franzen,
''how to play a paranoid public inquiry to her own advantage by raising the
spectres of McCarthyism and sexism and racial prejudice and such.''
In order to
guarantee that her plans succeed, Jammu needs the cooperation of the virtuous
Martin Probst, and she and her cohorts launch an elaborate plan to win him
over. The Probst house is bugged; Luisa is lured away from home; Barbara is
kidnapped by Singh, and Martin himself becomes the object of a seduction
campaign on the part of Jammu. Will Martin capitulate to her charms, or will
Jammu be transformed by his goodness and integrity? Will she manage to take
over the city, or will she be exposed before it's too late?
Though Mr. Franzen uses language and an
adept puzzle-making ability to create a clever narrative of Pynchonesque
intricacy, he has a tendency to manufacture complications for the sheer sake of
complexity; and as a result, the sections of ''The Twenty-Seventh City''
devoted to Jammu's conspiracy, while impressive, feel bloodless in comparison
to the closely detailed passages devoted to the Probsts.
What's more, the storyline about a
charismatic, Marxist-indoctrinated woman's attempt to seize control of an
American city by using terrorist tactics and a manipulative alliance with
inner-city blacks sounds like a red-baiting, paranoid nightmare come true. Is
Mr. Franzen trying to spoof such
fears by creating an absurd tale of corruption? Is he trying to point up
America's susceptibility to totalitarian politics by writing a new-wave version
of ''It Can't Happen Here''? Or is he - inadvertently, perhaps - feeding this
country's worst suspicions about foreigners and populist politics? In any case,
the reader finishes ''The Twenty-Seventh City'' feeling both impressed and
disturbed.
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