SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Shaky Town East.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 February 1992): 3, 7.

In the following review of Strong Motion, Eder calls Franzen the potential successor to the legacy of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.

Strong Motion seems for a while like a brilliant chaos. Bit by bit, the chaos settles—never completely; there are awkward and unassimilated knots of it—the brilliant things remain, and the connections among them begin to appear.

It is not always easy to read Franzen. He has a teeming and seemingly unreined imagination. He will try for more than he can achieve, but he tries for, and achieves, more than all but two or three in the successor generation to Pynchon and DeLillo. He may well be one of the successors.

Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, made a cosmos, real and surreal, of the city of St. Louis. Very roughly, against the...