Normally, if I get more than a few hundred pages into a novel, I finish it, but this (and A Man in Full) are the only 2 exceptions I can recall. I used to like books where the author hated his characters and the whole thing was seeing how much humiliation and physical pain he could subject them to, but nowadays I need to have some molecule of concern about the people I'm reading about. With the characters in this book, they could have lived happily ever after or been blown up by a bomb and it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference to me. By the time I was reading about the doctor on the ocean liner, I realized I didn't care, it didn't feel worth my time, and it even felt bad for my soul. So I quit reading it. I figured a happy ending would have felt tacked on and fake and a depressing ending would just be more of the same. Franzen's a wicked good writer, and there's lots of funny, beautifully-observed stuff in this novel, but it's a cold fish.