The author has no clothes?

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom has been highly praised ("the novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale" said Slate), yet descriptions of its themes have made me very suspicious that it is really a novel about nothing terribly important - like most current literature. Here's how someone at NPR sums it up:

Franzen tells the story of a deteriorating middle class family in Minnesota. The mom, Patty, is a former college athlete, a sort of basketball Emma Bovary who suffers from deep depression and a long unrequited longing for her husbands best friend from college, a successful rock 'n' roller named Rick Katz.

The husband, Walter, is a naive corporate do-gooder, oblivious to his wifes pain and his own. Their son Joey finds life more appealing in the house next door and he moves in with the neighbors, beginning an affair with their teenage daughter that extends throughout the entire novel.

Franzen tells this story in a form thats rather odd, marked by long sequences of exposition and a long middle section written by Patty for her therapist, which she composes in the third person.*

So it's good to see that my suspicions may well be right: there's a very negative review of the book (and Franzen's writing style) in The Atlantic. It certainly sounds like the sort of book I would dislike, and it seems extremely likely I should not bother following this writer.

* That reviewer finds the writing often "brilliant", but still finds the book unappealing. The pretty savage conclusion:

...every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didnt want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to.