SOURCE: Burn, Stephen. “Seismology and the City.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5227 (6 June 2003): 23.

In the following review of The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, Burn asserts that Franzen has refined the focus of his narratives from the broad cityscape of his first work to the narrower personal reflections of The Corrections.

In Britain, Jonathan Franzen's career seems to be moving in reverse. The first of his works to be published here was his third novel, the National Book Award-winning The Corrections (2001). This was followed by How to Be Alone (2002), a collection of journalism that partly traced the genesis of that long novel, and now Fourth Estate are publishing his first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992). One of the effects of this reversal is to highlight unexpected continuities in his work. Readers who remember Chuck and Bea Meisner as the focus for Lambert envy in The Corrections...