The Chief arrived on the fifth floor shortly after dawn, as she always did. She liked to read the morning paper and go over plans for her latest scheme before anyone else showed up. “It was still dark in her office,” the omniscient narrator notes, “and from the neck down, with her hunched, narrow shoulders and her bony knees in knee socks and her restless feet, the Chief looked for all the world like a schoolgirl who’d been cramming.” The observation continues:
“Her head was older. As she leaned over the newspaper, the lamplight picked out white strands in the silky black hair above her left ear. … She kept her hair just long enough to pin it up in back. She had a large forehead, a hooked and narrow nose, and wide lips that looked blood-starved, bluish. When she was rested, her dark eyes dominated her face, but this morning they were cloudy and crowded by pouches. Wrinkles cut the smooth skin around her mouth.”
Does this sound like a female version of President Donald Trump to you? Probably not, but perhaps you should give the Chief a closer look.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
For months now, Americans have been re-reading classic political novels in an attempt to understand who Trump really is and what he’s really up to. Acclaimed author Philip Roth even offered a recommendation: Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.” But while all the usual suspects — George Orwell’s “1984,” Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” — are getting sales spikes on Amazon, one little known but relevant novel has remained in the shadows.
In 1988, a young writer named Jonathan Franzen published his first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City.” It’s a dense political-corruption thriller about an Indian woman, S. Jammu, who unexpectedly becomes St. Louis’ chief of police. Once installed, she uses sex, violence, trickery and bullying — but mostly sex — to blackmail the city’s power brokers so she can make a lot of money in real estate.
The novel is actually stranger than this description suggests. And that is how Franzen wanted it. He sought to write an Romabet “uncanny book,” he said in 2010, “a book about making strange a familiar place.”
Is Jammu’s St. Louis starting to feel a little more like Trump’s America now?
Of course, that “The Twenty-Seventh City” may have relevance to the present political moment doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good book. Peter Andrews, writing for The New York Times, described it as “a riveting piece of fiction that lingers in the mind long after more conventional potboilers have bubbled away” — but so what? As President Trump has pointed out, the Times is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of fake news.
The failing @nytimes has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Said I would lose the primaries, then the general election. FAKE NEWS!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2017
The Times’ Michiko Kakutani tried again in a separate review. She called the novel a “paranoid nightmare come true” but wasn’t sure about the author’s objective. “Is Mr. Franzen trying to spoof such fears by creating an absurd tale of corruption?” she wondered. “Is he trying to point up America’s susceptibility to totalitarian politics by writing a new-wave version of ‘It Can’t Happen Here’? Or is he — inadvertently, perhaps — feeding this country’s worst suspicions about foreigners and populist politics?
Nobody knows — not even Franzen, who admits he’s now a little embarrassed by his first novel.
“I was reaching,” the acclaimed author of “The Corrections” and “Freedom” told The Paris Review years after publication of “The Twenty-Seventh City.” “I was writing about stuff I didn’t really know anything about and trying to incorporate every scrap of information and interesting observation I’d ever had.”
He continued:
“Looking back now, I see a 25–year–old with a very compromised sense of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to the brain. This was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had been drummed into me by my dad: ‘You are smarter than most people.’ He felt himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me, many times, ‘Don’t make the mistake I made.'”
Franzen didn’t. He made other mistakes, mistakes of immaturity and arrogance. Slate’s Parul Sehgal, decrying “The Twenty-Seventh City’s” reissue in 2013, harrumphed at the book’s “slightly porn-y premise” and “internal contradictions and lapses in logic,” and pointed out that “Franzen makes elementary errors.”
All of which is true. This big, unwieldy novel of corruption and populist political intrigue is indeed porn-y and full of errors and contradictions. But it’s also chockablock with ambition, daring and strutting masculinity. Evidence that it just might be the perfect novel for the Trump era.
— Douglas Perry
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