One way not to resolve a plot : Franzen's Freedom

A word of advice to all novelists : don't kill of your characters (especially toward the end of a book) with a car accident. It doesn't work, doesn't ring true. I know that people do die in car accidents and I know a few writers (Charles Baxter, old friend) have made this device work - but as a rule it doesn't, it feels like the author intruding in order to resolve plot difficulties. A crashed vehicle sure relieves the author of a lot of pressure, right? I would not say that Jonathan Franzen is running out of steam toward the end of "Freedom," in that the novel is still roiling with energy and great insights, some incidental and some innate to the story - like few other writers he really does work to plumb the depths of his characters' psyche and history, and with each succeeding chapter we feel we understand them more, they are characters to continue to grow and unfold through the course of the book - but Franzen did have to resolve (spoiler alert) the Walter-Lalitha relationship somehow and by sending her careening off the highway in West Virginia he took an easy bye - and also, planted too many heavy-handed clues (drive carefully!) - one of the few slips in this pretty powerful book. I'm in the home stretch, as Franzen wraps with a "six years later" section, inspired I would guess on Tolstoy's serene conclusion to War and Peace, not exactly on the same order of magnitude, but one of the few American novels that can play in that league. We know the characters very well by the end - do we like them any more? Patty remains the central character, and at this point I'm still not sure what I think about her, which is actually a compliment to Franzen - she's rich with ambiguity, like most people we know.