You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.

It has very little to do with democracy or the will of the people. In recent years Franzen has become recognized for his purveyance of opinions on everything from social networking services such as Twitter ("the ultimate irresponsible medium") and the proliferation of e-books ("just not permanent enough") to the disintegration of Europe ("The people making the decisions in Europe are bankers. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction.

His most recent novel Freedom (2010) led to a controversial appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections a sprawling satirical family drama drew widespread critical acclaim earned Franzen a National Book Award was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a shortlisting for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.