I tore through this novel. It's riveting. The style does not fall far from the Franzen tree; the prose is wonderful and he gives his readers time which each one of his major characters, who (as usual) have some mental health issues. This time, a couple of them are off the charts in that regard. These challenged people are drawn with acute attention to detail, and I found myself caring about what happened to them.

It was difficult, but I kept my ears and eyes closed to reviews before disappearing on vacation with this book, so as to be independently delighted with all the literary references and hilarious situations that were there to balance all the darkness.

Instead of trying to summarize the plot (it's too challenging to do that justice in what I'd like to be a review of pleasant length), I'll simply say that Franzen has done more than weave several enticing plots together--he has also created a loaded book aimed at many topical issues. It's thought-provoking on many fronts.

These are just a few examples of Franzen's mesmerizing composition:

...Every fact of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.

...Neither of us will ever forget the night with the death-bomb. It's like a memory we can always treasure.

Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true love, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she'd learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgment. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

...Tom was the one to jump up and get paper towels. Charles...would have let Leila mop up the wine--Charles, who almost never taught books by women, while Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. "I get feminism as an equal-rights issue," he'd said to her once. "What I don't get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men."

The word antenimbusian...that's creative.

Happy reading!