I was for some reason absolutely on board with this until about three quarters of the way through. I was confused by the praise Assange and his acolytes were heaping on the central protagonist Pip, described throughout as a genius and a legend and someone who always asks the right questions when she's just a young Californian with a lot of quippy 'I know you are but what am I?' dialogue, slightly irritated by the Freudian psychodrama around Assange at times, but not to the extent that I felt it to be a deal-breaker because I assumed that with the Great Expectations references, conservative proclamations Franzen has made on the novel, the fact that his latest series is called 'the Key to All Mythologies' that he is trying to wed passé eighteenth, nineteenth century novelistic tropes about virtue, chivalry and coincidence with a very watered-down systems-novel thing that much better writers of the generation /just/ preceding his pioneered and in doing so, effectively changed the literary novel.

On that basis I was willing to suspend judgement and it is also worth saying: there's a lot of plot, it's deftly handled, the prose is decent, and all the characters that aren't mothers are reasonably convincing (though I think the book would be significantly improved by Franzen's editor cutting maybe 40 - 60% of his characters' ruminations).

Once I got to the section narrated in the first person by the journalist, author about how he met his ex-wife / Pip's mother, the whole thing fell apart. The baffling, stupid, phoned-in riffs about how feminism drove this guy to devote his life to making the world a better place as a form of penance (Franzen's idea of what people doing useful work do, and indeed what life is like, seems to be stuck in the late nineties), the introduction of what has to be the twelfth, demanding, neurotic and status-obsessed mother, the total implausibility of the ex-wife's unlikableness, the omnipresent stain on American fiction since DFW of contentless recursion about interiority ('she was thinking that I knew that she was thinking and on the basis of that thinking thought further') belatedly made me realise that this is a terrible novel about airing sexual neurosis and the consequent resentment being directs at individuals each charcter holds responsible and it is about nothing else.

I have no problem with these as subjects in principle. A lot of mothers are demanding, neurotic and status-obsessed, but once the frippery of setting, or vague critique of America (which is reasonably often confused with socialism) is pulled back there is nothing else going on here.