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There are spoilers in this review but I don't recommend it to anyone ever so go ahead and read it anyway.

This book was actually the worst. I so rarely find so much to actually hate about a book. I've heard a lot of people recommend Jonathan Franzen and say excellent things. I have very few good things to say. I liked the way the assault issue near the beginning was dealt with, but the book was mostly so awful to women that that tidbit got crushed by all the sexism throughout the rest of the book. I also liked one character's final line. That's it. I disliked everything else about this book.

Franzen has this uncomfortable thing that he does where he takes a metaphor, or a character, and pushes them far, taking them through extreme situations that don't happen in real life to prove to you how deep and important and symbolic they are. And by the time you've read through 50 pages of this super important vital metaphor, you are so tired of the metaphor, it has been so shoved in your face in so many different ways, he's screamed it into your face so many times, that you've lost all will to care. When awful things happened to the characters, I ended up just sort of shrugging. Once I even laughed at what I assume is meant to be a tragic scene because his plot points were so ridiculous and overdone. He carries everything too far, and in doing so, it ceases to hold importance. Someone doesn't just wait in the cold, she waits in the cold until she might have hypothermia and the other character has to freak out warming her up so she won't die. People either whisper or they're screaming. People are horribly depressed or on top of the world. Franzen doesn't understand subtlety. I guess a question I would like answered is if he knows that he doesn't. Does Franzen genuinely believe he is being carefully, intricately deep? If so, this book might get worse.

Women are either cold or they're crazy, but are all vindictive and too emotional; men fight over their politics and screw up their careers and are always angry; in the classic, postmodern-man-Freudian approach, not one character can have a normal, healthy sex life, and all of them resent their parents. I didn't like one character in this book. Franzen seems to have been going for a 'we're all screwed up inside' tilt, which fails because he takes it so far that you cease to care about the characters all together. They have so many emotions, they aren't real people. And if you look closely, every character maps exactly onto at least one other character, if not more or all of them. Again, I'm not sure if it would be better or worse if it turned out Franzen had done this on purpose.

This book was too long. I've rarely been happier to finish a book in my life, so happy that I didn't have to read it anymore. I could point out a thousand other things to hate about this book, including for example the fact that in one section he has three main characters' names all begin with a 'J' and all of them are standard white people names and it gets incredibly confusing, which I found utterly unnecessary. Or that the only non-white character is disgustingly exoticized and gets a crappy arc without any allowance for character development whatsoever, in which all she exists for is idolizing the main white male character, committing adultery with him and so fulfilling his male fantasies, and then dying.

At one point yesterday someone on the crew team apologized for dripping sauce on my book and I said that I didn't even really mind.