Midwestern roots and boomer experiences are wordsmithed by Franzen into delicious sentences and paragraphs. I chafed when he wrote like an atheist, but I kept looking at his title to realize it was all so Christ-like, so true. He makes it look easy to write about being a teenager, sex, religion and bird watching. What really saves him turns out to be bird watching. Here's an experience of 'salvation'--one that I share, except I find it in my neighborhood, mostly on foot: "to be juggling a stick shift and a thermos of coffee when the roads were still gray and empty, to be out ahead of everyone, to see no headlights on the Pacific Coast Highway, to be the only car pulled over at Racho del Oso State Park, to already be on site when the birds were waking up, to hear their voices in the willow thickets and the salt march and the meadow whose scattered oaks were draped with epiphytes, to sense the birds' collective beauty immiment and findable in there: what a pure joy this all was."