I read the 30-page essay 'My Three Stooges' from 'Hooking Up' again before writing this, and I have to agree with Wolfe. Big, realistic, researched, in-the-moment and in-your-face novels are the way to go, and Wolfe has achieved that 100% with this book. Probably the fastest 800 pages I've ever read, and way up there when it comes to the pleasure factor as well.

It's a good thing that Wolfe spent 11 years writing this monster, because for a while there I was beginning to despair how someone can know all this stuff and write about it, since I couldn't begin to imagine how I could do something similar. The knowledge that it took Wolfe 11 years is very reassuring, as I'm sure that if I spent 11 years traveling around the world researching things I'd come up with some pretty interesting things as well.

I almost gave this book six stars, but in the end some niggling doubts surfaced and I had to downgrade it to five stars. The main thing was how untruthful his depiction of Finland was. I can't begin to imagine the damage done to Finland's reputation by this book. Now everyone will think Finland is a Catholic country and that you can't get an abortion here, which is as far from the truth as you can possibly get. I almost died from laughter in the scene where Wolfe has an American man suggesting to a Finnish woman that she travel from Finland to USA because "abortions are easy to get here". In reality, it would be the other way around. Anyway, if he can't get simple facts like these straight, other things in the book are cast in doubt as well, so that detracted a little from the reading experience.