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Rating: 
Summary: Shaky Loving
Review: Franzen's "Strong Motion" is a good entrypoint into his oeuvre. As a Southern California resident, I am attracted to earthquake-related fiction, and the pathetic irony Franzen uses to tie the tremors to a young man's quest for an authentic relationship is thinly veiled but effective.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Great things about this novel include:- The central idea -- both the concept of earthquakes in the Boston area, and the concept of how they might have been caused.
- The writing -- full of brilliant images, razor-sharp observation, and humanity. Franzen is the only novelist I know whose characters have the real-life habit of ending sentences with "so", as in "Well, he's coming in tomorrow, so." Other reviewers have commented on the raccoon sequence, which is affecting and unforgettable.
- The setting -- if Boston were destroyed in an earthquake, you could reconstruct it from the description given in the book.
- The social conscience -- in particular, the sequence about the effects of the settlers on New England stands out.
- And the gutsiness of having a character who's a militant anti-abortionist with a heart of gold. The weaknesses:
- The main characters aren't entirely likeable. This applies particularly to the female characters; Louis's mother Melanie is an ogre, his sister Eileen is a spoiled idiot, his Texan girlfriend Lauren is just an annoyance. Even Renee, the main female character, is curiously static; Louis develops far more as the book goes on.
- It's such a big, ambitious book, and yet a small number of main characters are linked into all the plots. In particular, it seems contrived that Eileen's boyfriend Peter has a direct family link into the vast conspiracy. The weaknesses -- in particular, the events leading up to Louis and Renee's separation halfway through the book -- made me so impatient that I actually gave up reading it for a while. But I'm very glad I returned to it. A lot of the most memorable passages are in the second half, there's a great sense of gathering apocalypse and all the pleasures of a well-constructed thriller, and it ends on an emotional high that prefigures, but doesn't quite match, that at the end of The Corrections. Definitely worth a read, particularly if (by sheer coincidence) you live on the same street as the hero...
Rating: 
Summary: Ground Shaking
Review: I just finished this book yesterday and I must say that it's going on my top ten favorite books list.
I picked up Strong Motion because I'd heard about Jonathan Franzen through some fans of David Foster Wallace. I was not dissapointed. I'll skip the plot synopsis, since I've noticed that it has been done already, but I'll tell you what I loved about the book.
Scenery. The book is set in Massachusetts -- mostly in Boston and its surrounding areas. I grew up just south of Boston, so the territory was familiar to me. Franzen really made me feel like I was back in that city, walking its streets, taking the train around. Many authors can write about being in the city, but few can really capture the feeling of a specific city like Franzen does for Boston. I really like that.
Characters. Franzen creates some of the most memorable character I've ever read. Not for their quirkiness (a la Dickens) but more in the way that it is easy to see yourself in them. In Strong Motion, I was able to see some of my own qualities in both Louis and Rene and it gives the book a kind of intimacy.
Details. There is a lot of detail in Strong Motion. I learned a lot about earthquakes and chemicals while reading the book. Franzen's skill, however, is integrating the technical details with the storyline, making the two fit together seamlessly. I never thought "ok, here we go with more technical stuff...".
I really loved this book and I'd suggest it to anyone who enjoyed Franzen's The Corrections (which I also loved) or even David Foster Wallace, Don Delillo or Paula Fox. I found myself very involved in the story (which hits on abortions, earthquakes, sex, love, family, religious zeal and more). Do yourself a favor and read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I love Jonathan Franzen's work, especially The Twenty Seventh City, which is just brilliant. The Corrections is pretty good too. But I am terriby disappointed by his second novel, Strong Motion. It is murky, implausible, pointless, and devoid of admirable characters, moving sentiments or delightful plot twists. Don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: Better than The Corrections
Review: I picked up Strong Motion after enjoying Franzen's The Corrections. The story lines in this novel are more complexly layered than those in The Corrections, but also more tightly organized. Most notably, in stark contrast to The Corrections, Franzen does not send us off to the Baltics to experience needless side stories. Every overlapping and interwoven piece of text is important to the rest of the novel. Brief decriptions of the plot do not do the book justice, because they come off as unbelievable, even gimmicky. While Franzen does take bold risks with this story and his characters, this novel is so well crafted that I did not even pause to consider whether a particular plot twist was plausible. Like all good fiction, the unreal becomes real as the story unfolds. With rich, conflicted characters and smart, penetrating observations of American society, Franzen's Strong Motion is a master work. It is easy to see why there was such a buzz around the release of The Corrections: Franzen is one of the best contemporary American literary fiction has to offer.
Rating:
Summary: Better than The Corrections
Review: I picked up Strong Motion after enjoying Franzen's The Corrections. The story lines in this novel are more complexly layered than those in The Corrections, but also more tightly organized. Most notably, in stark contrast to The Corrections, Franzen does not send us off to the Baltics to experience needless side stories. Every overlapping and interwoven piece of text is important to the rest of the novel. Brief decriptions of the plot do not do the book justice, because they come off as unbelievable, even gimmicky. While Franzen does take bold risks with this story and his characters, this novel is so well crafted that I did not even pause to consider whether a particular plot twist was plausible. Like all good fiction, the unreal becomes real as the story unfolds. With rich, conflicted characters and smart, penetrating observations of American society, Franzen's Strong Motion is a master work. It is easy to see why there was such a buzz around the release of The Corrections: Franzen is one of the best contemporary American literary fiction has to offer.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious, experimental, messy
Review: I read Strong Motion after reading Franzen's excellent The Corrections, a much more complete novel that is superior to this one in almost every aspect. That said, there is a lot to like in Strong Motion. Louis Holland is a complex and well defined character; he's not completely likeable, but the reader ends up caring about him despite his shortcomings. His introspectiveness perpetuates his isolation and strains his relationships with those around him - his parents, sister, and romantic interests. The one person that he does make an effort to extend himself to rejects him so completely that he sleepwalks though the one subsequent relationship that might have had the potential to have made him happy. The plot is based on some premises that I found a bit difficult to swallow (large-scale seismic activity prompted by pumping waste into deepwater wells?), but if you can suspend your disbelief in the concept of a big evil corporation trying to cut costs and inadvertently moving around tectonic plates then the plot does a nice job in steering big business, academia, and religious fundamentalists on a collision course. The novel often feels quite experimental. At one point we're looking at the world from the vantage point of a solitary raccoon, whose superior intelligence doesn't quite make up for the fact that he doesn't move in a pack like other night creatures - dogs and rats (the raccoon might mirror the man-in-isolation Louis Holland character). At another point we look through the eyes of a computer program. Emotions fly as earthquakes toss characters around. All of this is interesting and masterfully written, but some of it ends up being fairly extraneous to the heart of the novel. This is an ambitious, structurally messy novel - but with flashes of brilliance. I could have just as easily given it four stars. Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: And this was written BEFORE 9/11 and Enron!!?
Review: I think Frantzen is downright scary! Not only does he write our inner worlds so accurately, most people hate him and his books... but he also seems to know our outer world in an eerily perceptive way. Just read the pages describing a "decadent people's" response to a catastrophe, and there you are in our 9/11 reality. Those pages gave me goosebumps. And then, a few pages on, we watch all the monsters who created a financial and environmental disaster, skip away with their millions. Hmmmm...is he not only damn talented with words, with deep, deep understanding of what people really are, of what love is, what sacrifice is, but also what our corrupt society is. Frankly, I keep being amazed, and I can't wait to read everything he's written. Is it possible that readers become so upset with him because he's bringing literature to a new realm? A realm we may not be ready for? A realm we're not comforable with because it's so much less "arty"--despite his beauty with words, but so much more real. No his characters are not likeable--are we, when we're all naked and confused and scared and selfish? I don't think so. But they--with only one or two exceptions in his books--are loveable. We come to know his characters the way God must. From the inside, where, with all the ugliness and flaws, there is grace and beauty. And ultimately, for all the satire, the irony, the cynicism, these books are rich in hope, in redemption, in grace. Damn this is a writer who Knows Something!
Rating:
Summary: Shaken beliefs
Review: Jonathan Franzen's novels so far, "Strong Motion" and "The Twenty-Seventh City," are notable because he breaks the conventions of workshopped-to-death books and blasts into the world of facts. His prose style isn't as graceful as Mark Helprin's, but he does inhabit the same world of fantastic plots, existential heros and man-made disasters. In "Strong Motion," Franzen depicts a man and woman struggling to discover the source of strange earthquakes in Boston as they fight against the materialism of society and their upbringings. Along the way, Franzen injects his usual host of bizarre characters, including a fundamentalist minister-cult leader who turns out to be just as much an outcast as the protagonists. Franzen also fills the book with history and odd facts; his short description of the life of a racoon in Boston is devastating; it's worth the price of the book. The lead character, Louis, is unappealing, as the Kirkus review suggests, which proves a drag on the novel
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