I recently finished reading The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen. Now, before I proceed with any sort of commentary, I should note that it’s been a long time since I’ve read any fiction, and as unskilled as I am at writing reviews for anything, this one will just have to be a best effort like any other.

The Twenty-Seventh City is a novel set in St. Louis, where a new police chief, Jammu, was hired to fix the crime problem. As it turned out, this new chief is not only a woman, but she came from Bombay, India, where she used innovative ideas to solve the crime problem there. This fact about her was not really a point of controversy about her as much as it was a point that helped her win the job of the police chief of St. Louis. Jammu was young, charasmatic, and ready to take the lead in reviving downtown. It took probably about 150 pages, though, before I realized that Jammu was not the main character.

Martin Probst was known throughout St. Louis, especially in the business community. He was a contractor, but he wasn’t just any contractor. He was the man who built the arch. And he was the chairman of Municipal Growth, an association of local business executives who have some stake in the vitality of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Of all the characters in the story who exercised any influence in local politics, it turned out that Probst was also the least corruptable. This is where Jammu ran into trouble in trying to implement her plan to change the face of downtown St. Louis.

The story began with the detail clearly explained that in order for Jammu to influence the direction of the city, she needed to get Municipal Growth to sign off on the plan. Her methods, however, were entirely devious. In order to get her way, she would influence the member of Municipal Growth by sending them into what was called “the State.” Yes, that’s State with a capital S. For Probst, this involved his dog getting assassinated, his daughter running away, and his marriage deteriorating, among other things.

What ensued throughout the story became an incredibly complex political conspiracy to shift power to Jammu and financial capital downtown. In its course, the story becomes a fictional study and — to some extent — exaggeration of existing theories of the urban regime. In an urban regime, a small group of players steer the direction of city politics. In the Twenty-Seventh City, the regime composed of an alliance between the mayor and Municipal Growth is infiltrated by Jammu, and a new competing regime is formed.

If I reveal much more about the story, I’ll end up giving away too much of the story. Franzen’s book is well worth the read, as it follows a complex and unusual series of political power plays and conspiracies. While the story is entirely fictional, it also serves as a sort of cautionary tale to warn us of the dangers of the unchecked power of an urban regime. I would especially recommend this book to any student of policy or politics as an entertaining diversion from the usual set of theoretical or empirical texts our classes require.