A New York Times bestselling magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother–her only family–is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, … doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world–including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters–Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers–and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
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I’m reading this now, but it hasn’t really grabbed me. I’ve liked almost all other of his books, except Strong Motion.
Jonathan Franzen’s, ‘Purity’ is an incredible and challenging read.
It is a work which attacks general ideas of individual identity and idealism with a very broad net. Typical for Franzen his interwoven characters are not particularly likeable but challenging, enthralling and realistic at many levels.
In Purity, Franzen is going up against different notions of social narrative and construction and how this reaches its vain extremity through the modern-day internet, but also earlier through all-pervasive political structures, and forms of control.
Who controls us? Is it a messed up parent or two, who frankly may have their own ghostly neurosis to blame? Or is it societal conditioning, whether political pursuits like Communism come into play, or the modern day search for popularity or ‘likes’ on social media channels. And the flip side of his argument is that in the end, whether at the hands of the Stasi or buried in the cyber cloud;
No personal secrets are safe.
Franzen challenges and totally deconstructs, then bins youthful idealism, and other broad metaphors of our time, especially in his character ‘Pip’ Purity Tyler. She has it all; a kooky intelligent mother with secrets, no idea of her father, cash-poor, longing for a man and a cause. Pip is sweet, likeable, identifiable but adrift. Her quest to find her father, to figure her life out, castes her into the hands of Andreas Wolf, a famous Wikileaks Assange-like character with the capability of finding her father.
Yet, with Franzen, things are rarely that simple.
He then draws you into Andreas Wolf’s own messed-up upbringing in Stasi controlled East Berlin in the lead-up to the fall of the Wall. Franzen explores similar themes with Wolf’s character, a very sickly and psychologically troubling relationship with his beautiful mother, a father who is ‘big-up’ in the Communist regime, with a son, the charismatic Andreas, intent on shining a mirror or ‘Sunlight’ onto all of the shams, and hypocrisy he sees around him.
Then add to this, Annagret and Katya, Leila, Tom and Annabel, and finally back to Pip. His characters’ stories, each contained in mostly independent sections, all make you feel as messed-up or less-messed up as you go along…so, empathetic is the word I’m searching for, in a non-judgmental kind of way as the complex interwoven story unfolds.
The moral? Does there have to be one?
Well, without giving anything away, I think it’s deconstructing the whole notion of ‘Purity’. Purity is a theme which returns at many levels through this work. Aren’t we all flawed in some way? Everyone has a secret hidden somewhere behind a certain well-orchestrated personal identity, even though we work so hard to maintain our socially acceptable guises in daily life. He deconstructs this well, as he does class but if I have to find sticking points, for me, it would be these two.
Racial difference is given a feeble peppered mention, Hispanic hints in Ramon, for example at the beginning. But there is no large character other than the reporter Leila with any juicy ‘ethnic otherness’. Racial difference is generally peripheral. It’s not Franzen’s preferential area of focus here. He tells the cultural ‘human’ story, like Andreas’ German mother’s link to the UK, with an enthralling historical ‘cultural’ twist.
The second down side for me was the characterization of women. The women in Purity were generally all terribly manipulative, sexually and psychologically, and the ones that weren’t bailed out quick, like Colleen, with Pip being the only sort of middle-ground. His female characters are all presented as victims with unknown superhero powers to mess totally with the heads of the men they encounter. Hmm, thanks a lot! Anyway, even in this regard, Franzen made me think, got me flustered, needing to put down the book for a day or two, and so on…
Purity is Franzen at his best though. It is a fierce, fast-paced novel. There’s murder, a complicated unraveling plot spanning different geographical locations, torturous psychological intrigue, a lot of sex, and also humor.
Franzen’s writing remains exceptional as always, well thought-out and researched. You may not agree with him, but frankly I don’t think he cares or wants you to. He triggers you to think, and to question. And, for that, Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Purity’ has discussion points a dozen!
I’ve read The Corrections, Freedom, and now Purity. Don’t you love discovering an author and then realizing you’ve got a whole biography of theirs to explore? Purity is all kinds of layered emotional regression after emotional regression. We follow a character for a hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person she meets at the end of the hundred pages only to regress into the backstory of the person they meet at the end of the next hundred pages. Even though the book is Franzen’s usual 600 page paperweight there really wasn’t much wasted space until the end. His ability to describe personalities is so strong. You feel like you know these people better than your own family at times. Their secret desires, their shattered confidences, their disgusting thoughts. I felt like a better husband and dad while reading this book – feeling lucky for what I have and more grateful for the love around me in a world of heartbroken people. For anyone who hasn’t read Franzen’s stuff, I’d personally recommend this only after The Corrections and Freedom. Doesn’t quite get to the level of those two though it’s not far off.