SOURCE: Slung, Michele. “Meet Them in St. Louis.” Washington Post Book World 18, no. 36 (4 September 1988): 1-2.

In the following review of The Twenty-Seventh City, Slung praises Franzen's writing, contending that the author has “an original voice.”

As one plunges into this unsettling and visionary first novel [The Twenty-Seventh City], it's hard not to be infected by the author's own confidence. For much of the book, one simply forgets that Jonathan Franzen is a very young man, that this is a beginner's effort, and that the lifelike setting is, in fact, an alternate reality.

The “twenty-seventh city” is St. Louis, Missouri, a once thriving Mississippi River port, now—the time is 1984—a place of little interest to anyone farther east than Illinois or farther west than Kansas. “What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St. Louis...