Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I love that Franzen is so ambitious, trying to discuss on at least some level such topics as: date rape, unrequited love, the Iraq war, gentrification, class conflict, music, the music business, friendship and, at its very heart, family dynamics. The book gets five stars for effort.

I'm impressed at how readable this book was despite the fact that I found virtually all its characters reprehensible through at least the first four hundred pages. So, for readability, I'd give this book three or four stars.

Some of the story, I'm afraid, doesn't ring at all true to me, and that's a problem. Most of my problem with the story comes down to my problems, mentioned above, concerning virtually all of the main characters, who are drawn so as to be extremely unsympathetic through the first two-thirds of the book. Unfortunately, there's very little to indicate how it is that the characters become more bearable by the final chapters. Pretty much everyone has been traumatized in one way or another while exercising their personal Freedom, and the nation itself has waged a war that it justified ex post facto as an effort to give the gift of Freedom to the Middle East. So I guess these characters examine their lives in light of the consequences that their actions have, but it doesn't really seem that they're that introspective. People change, in that the author treats them with a more sympathetic eye, but in some ways I feel as if some of the characters haven't really changed at all. So in terms of story, or the arc of the story and the growth of its characters, I rate this book somewhere between one and two stars.

Regarding all those important topics that I mention this book touches on: sometimes I get the feeling that I'm being lectured to by someone from the New York Times editorial board. I'm a pretty liberal person, but the smugness of some of the hero's monologues is annoying; Walter cedes not one inch of moral high ground throughout this book. Even when he's wrong, he's right. So again, a problem with character - in this instance, Saint Walter of Assisi.

I did not like the insertion of two lengthy autobiographical pieces by a main character, Patty, who refers to herself throughout those sections in the third person. It's a way of getting completely inside her head, I understand, but the whole point of an omniscient author is that he or she can get inside anybody's head on behalf of his reader. These autobiographical sections illustrate my point regarding the characters: By virtue of her writing these pieces Franzen presents Patty as being introspective, but my reading of them gives very little ammunition to justify the shift in treatment that transforms her character.

And, finally I'll add that the book was, simply, too long. Some of those sermons should have been either cut out entirely or drastically reduced.