Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen is a fantastic mix of literary fiction and mystery. Superbly drawn characters, psychological punch and vivid descriptions are mixed with an intriguing mystery that revolves around the cause of a swarm of earthquakes in the Boston area. Strong Motion is the Jonathan Franzen version of Erin Brockovich. In it, he deftly and intelligently deals with issues of abortion and corporate malfeasance, while retaining the introspective flow of his dynamic characters and their intense interactions.

The novel follows Louis Holland as he deals with a dysfunctional family, middling career and conflicting love interests. Earthquakes are what set this story in motion. They kill his grandmother and bring Renee Seitchek, a seismologist, into his orbit. The paths of many characters get tangled up and converge seamlessly as they delve into his grandmother’s inheritance, which is composed of stock in a industrial chemical company.

This type of convergence-plot seems in vogue recently and it doesn’t always work. It often feels forced, and you can imagine the author struggling to find ways to unify the various plot lines and characters. The links are sometimes tenuous and there are instances when you simply must employ a suspension of disbelief to make reading enjoyable. That isn’t a problem with Franzen’s Strong Motion. The intersecting plot lines make complete sense and bring natural order to the story.

I have a habit of turning down the corner of a page that has a particular passage that I found extraordinary. Sometimes I’ll review them later and not quite know what I found so compelling, but it’s easy to understand my many markers in Strong Motion.

The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur.

Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers.

If you get your life in balance with your death, you stop panicking. Life stops being just the status quo that you hope won’t end for a long time.

If you haven’t already figured it out, Franzen likes long sentences and has a penchant for beautifully describing discontent and those things that we rarely admit to ourselves. Strong Motion is a more raw, blunt version of Franzen’s acclaimed The Corrections, which makes it different, not better or worse.

The one area where Franzen seems one-dimensional is sex. The sexual interactions between characters are confrontational and often mixed with violence. I don’t doubt that this is part of the broad spectrum of sexuality, but it seems a bit one note and distracting at times. I think it’s a red flag if I’m wondering whether Franzen just has some horrible sexual past he’s trying to work out on the page or if he’s trying to make a point through or about sexual intimacy.

I’m being hard on Franzen, but only because there’s nothing else to pick on. Strong Motion is that good. Franzen delivers gripping personal portrayals, frightening human insight as well as a taut and well plotted mystery. I highly recommend Strong Motion, for fans of The Corrections or those new to Franzen’s work.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a slim, but satisfying mystery as well as an insightful examination and extension of a beloved fictional character. The story revolves around Linus Steinman, a nine year old mute, who escaped Nazi Germany with an African gray parrot named Bruno. Bruno’s past associations coupled with his numerical utterances bring the greedy and amoral to his lodging house.

The New York Times Book Review says The Final Solution is “On par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon’s last novel, the marvelous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” I’m not the NYT, but I’d beg to differ. I’m a huge Kavalier & Clay fan, and while The Final Solution is good, it simply doesn’t bristle with passion and power of the former. And I guess Chabon’s Summerland doesn’t count as a novel?

Instead, The Final Solution is a bit aloof like the unnamed detective who works to solve the mystery. So while the tight plot is enjoyable, the only character that truly jumps off the page is the aged Sherlock Holmes. And even then we’re never told it is that famous detective. So it reads more like a great cover band, or maybe Sammy Hagar as the front man for Van Halen. The ‘story’ stands on it’s own, but is certainly given considerably more weight given Chabon’s literary history.

I found some of the P.S. features very interesting. The NPR interview in particular revealed Chabon’s admiration for David Mitchell and Cynthia Ozick. I’m a huge Mitchell fan and immediately picked up an Ozick title. I find the relationships between authors, most often exposed in the acknowledgments, to be a fascinating and valuable tool in finding other great reading.

For example, in Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, he acknowledges Neal Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. Similarly, Susanna Clarke acknowledges Neil Gaiman in the fabulous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’d be extremely interested in a LibraryThing like interface that exposed these connections to readers.

So, pick up The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and then cross your fingers and hope that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union returns Chabon to his Kavalier & Clay form.