SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “America's History May Not Be Written by Americans.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (4 September 1988): 3, 7.

In the following review of The Twenty-Seventh City, Eder lauds the portrayal of the book's Indian characters while expressing disappointment in the one-dimensional natures of Franzen's American characters.

Jonathan Franzen has written a novel of our times [The Twenty-Seventh City]; so imaginatively and expansively of our times, that it seems ahead of them. The news we get about ourselves is always a little out of date. Anyone able to look very hard at where we are right now edges on prophesy.

The Twenty-Seventh City is Franzen's first novel. The reader may feel like a college confronted with an A-plus applicant who is a star basketball player, worked last summer in the Guayaquil slums, hacked his way into the computer at the National Security Agency, wrote a sonnet sequence in demotic Greek...