Terra Not So Firma

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By Newsweek Editors

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Strong Motion. By Jonathan Franzen. 508 pages. Farrar Straus Giroux. $22.95.

No doubt about it: Jonathan Franzen, 32, is one of the most extraordinary writers around. His first novel, "The Twenty-Seventh City," published three years ago, was a huge and masterly drama of St. Louis under siege, gripping and surreal and overwhelmingly convincing. In "Strong Motion" the proportions are a bit different: this novel, too, is huge, but its surreal overtones are less prominent while Franzen zeroes in on his main characters, a 23-year-old lost soul named Louis and his girlfriend Renee, a Harvard seismologist. Tracking down the role of a chemical company in a peculiar series of earthquakes rocking some of Boston's outlying suburbs, the two experience emotional disruptions just as shattering as the geophysical ones.

As a writer, Franzen seems less at ease in the real world than he is in a heightened atmosphere of spooky doings and pending disasters. The creepy parts of "Strong Motion" show all the brilliance of "The Twenty-Seventh City," but the scenes that delve directly into character, or describe such workaday creatures as a Harvard Business School student, are oddly self-conscious. Too often Franzen falls back on his talent, presenting sentences and paragraphs of beautiful writing that simply call attention to themselves rather than advance the story. Maybe now that he's over the traditional hurdle of the second novel he can relax and let his prodigious gifts work invisibly once more. The news that he is at work on a third is welcome indeed.

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