I'm not ashamed to admit that I didn't make it even a quarter of the way through this novel. (The only reason I rate it 2 stars instead of 1 is out of the guilt I feel for giving the lowest rating to a book I didn't finish.) I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I cannot suffer Franzen's prose. He's supposed to be one of the titans of modern American lit, and I have to struggle to keep myself from falling asleep after just one or two of his pages. I didn't like what I read of the novel--it was dull, cranky, and filled with too much depiction of the sort of suburban malaise that I find so incredibly cliched--but what I don't like even more is the fact that I can't even keep engaged in reading one of the most important authors of my time.