The city of Boston is being rattled by earthquakes and rocked by anti-abortion protests when Louis Holland meets Renee Seitchek. Louis is an angry member of the Nowhere Generation; Renee is a passionate and embittered seismologist seven years his senior. Their love-hate love affair has scarcely begun when Renee begins to wonder: Could the earthquakes have a human cause? Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed Twenty-Seventh City, has created an intoxicating, provocative vision of a society divided against itself and catastrophically at odds with nature.