Purity

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


“Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is…”

So goes the driving force behind Purity, this 2015 novel from Author Jonathan Franzen. She doesn’t know who her father is and she has a contentious relationship with her mother—all she knows is that her real name is Purity, a name she hates. Pip is saddled with 130 thousand in student debt while living with anarchists in a squat in Oakland when one day she encounters a German peace activist who draws her into something called The Sunlight Project. The Sunlight Project is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a man who believes in transparency for all…except maybe for himself…

There are many elements of the sort of brilliance you can expect from Jonathan Franzen, with commentary about privacy and leaking secrets, with a Julian Assange-like character whose mission is to expose others’ secrets while harboring one deep secret of his own. Pip doesn’t know who her father is, nor does she even know when her real birthday is…and this journey she takes her to South America and Colorado and back as the layers are pulled back in a tale that is told from both omniscient narrator and occasional first person POV, with time shifting, in a tale that is sometimes told out of order. It is a soap opera without being quite as fun as Freedom (which I really enjoyed). It is still a novel told with the same level of detached seriousness and general a sense of humor that I noted in Freedom.

While at times is it fascinating, this does not lend itself to reading for ten minutes at a time and then putting it back down (which is what I tend to do). But it was the main reason that I found myself losing track of things in this multi-layered story. That’s when getting through 563 pages begins to feel like work. (Because without page breaks or chapters, there is often no logical place to put a bookmark in.)

And that is my not-so-brilliant observation of Purity. (There are certainly more serious issues with Franzen and Purity that smarter people than me have written about. The misogyny of this book, for one… https://medium.com/the-establishment/...)...

But…you know: Franzen’s gotta Franzen.




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