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I’m having a very hard time summarizing my thoughts on this one, but I think that’s a good thing. As a whole, I think I appreciated this one more than I sometimes thought I did while I was reading. On the one hand, the flowing nature of the narrative, where one thought, event, moment flows seamlessly into the next, made it difficult to find natural places to pause my reading. However, this same structure is what made the characters’ inner and outer experiences so compelling; it mirrored as much as possible how we remember our choices, as inextricably linked to what comes next and to what came before. I also appreciated the way that Franzen gave opportunities to view the main cast of characters from different angles before diving into their individual (and very different) perspectives on the same series of events and timelines. Even if the choices the characters made were flawed, or outright cruel, seeing them recognize these negative motivations kept me from being able to completely distance myself from them; whether or not I wanted to, I at least understood them, even if I still disliked them (mostly Joey, I still really really dislike Joey). Did I come out of this viewing it as “The Great American Novel” like some of the quoted reviews stated? No, definitely not, but I did come away with a lot to contemplate, and in that way I think Franzen accomplished his goal. Overall, this was a solid contemporary, and at times painfully realistic, human drama, but one I would only recommend to those interested in the ideas it presents, rather than the story itself.