in a volvo-shaped handbasket
Heather Havrilesky on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. "The really impressive feat here is Franzen's larger portrayal of the misguided mistakes of middle-class America: the delusions we indulge in our pursuit of happiness, the ways we neglect the greater good for the sake of our little family units, and the difficulty of setting aside our personal needs to save a world on the brink of total collapse. We're free, yes, and we use our freedom to build our own little fussy, claustrophobic, granite-countertopped islands, while the rest of the world goes straight to hell around us."