Word: franzens
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...results of this shift can be seen in Magna's order book. Although European and American auto production inched up only slightly during fiscal 1998, the company's sales topped $6 billion--a 19% jump over 1997. "Systems suppliers are getting a bigger piece of the pie," says Anders Franzen, vice president for strategic sourcing at Sweden's Volvo, which is now in the process of being purchased by Ford...
Fiction writer Jonathan Franzen faced that fact last year in a long, fretful article in Harper's magazine. "The novelist," he wrote, "has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture...
...Franzen's gloomy observation has not deflected him or three other gifted writers of his acquaintance: Donald Antrim, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace, last year's young literary comet. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names...
...Franzen and the others may benefit from Wallace's success. The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen's deft social-science fiction about a former Bombay police chief who plots to take over St. Louis, Missouri, first published in 1988, was recently released in paperback (Noonday Press; 517 pages...
...Franzen displays a striking talent for turning an implausible plot into a convincing omen. Middle-class flight, a shriveled tax base and the usual urban rumpuses encourage St. Louis authorities to hire S. Jammu, a woman related to Indira Gandhi, to run its police department. Soon Jammu and her imported Indian co-conspirators launch a power grab that includes Orwellian public relations, kidnappings and pet assassinations. Franzen's twisty plot and thriller pace are the sweeteners that mask his caustic commentary on urban decline...