Strong Motion

By Jonathan Franzen

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Strong Motion (1992) is Jonathan Franzen's second novel, published before The Corrections, about earthquakes that strike the Boston area. Radio engineer Louis Holland and Harvard seismologist Renée Seitchek begin to suspect that a chemical company's waste-disposal practices are triggering the quakes. Their romance unfolds amid corporate secrecy, family money, religious protest and the question of who pays when the ground itself seems to take sides.

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• Stephen King: “On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition (Scribner, 2010), per afterword list in On Writing (10th anniv. ed.)”