I wish I had read Roxane Gay's review before picking this up, because I largely agreed with her assessment of the book as disappointing. I so much wanted this to be an interesting and engaging take on modern relationships and issues of our times.

But instead, I got a lot of misrepresentations of feminism: a woman forcing her husband to pee sitting down, and he in turn rebelling by secretly pissing in the sink. . . Another young woman in high school being sexually abused by her step-father and lots of consideration of her wanting/liking it?!

Not to mention the two megalomaniacal characters (Anabel and Andreas) who were painted as some vague kind of mentally ill (as infuriatingly self-involved and moralistically rigid).

There was a lot here too about privilege-- rejecting it, but having it there waiting still. Anabel rejected her family's wealth because it was tainted in the "River of Meat." And lives, and raises her daughter, in self-ascribed poverty. Yet so easily persuaded by her grown daughter to start to tap into her inheritance.

I felt Franzen was trying to hard to include simplistic critiques on the Internet, projects like Wikileaks and gender politics, all while maintaining a miogynistic, privileged and ableist perspective.