Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

“My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.” “Isn’t that everybody’s life?”

She’d entered every conceivable combination of keywords into every commercial search engine and ended up with nothing but an acute appreciation of the limitations of search engines.

She had no interest in “getting to know” her father, she already had her hands full with her mother, but it seemed to her that he should give her money. Her $130,000 in student debt was far less than he’d saved by not raising her and not sending her to college. Of course, he might not see why he should pay anything now for a child whom he hadn’t enjoyed the “use” of, and who wasn’t offering him any future “use,” either. But given her mother’s hysteria and hypochondria, Pip could imagine him as a basically decent person in whom her mother had brought out the worst, and who was now peaceably married to someone else, and who might feel relieved and grateful to know that his long-lost daughter was alive; grateful enough to take out his checkbook. If she had to, she was even willing to offer modest concessions, the occasional email or phone call, the annual Christmas card, a Facebook friendship. At twenty-three, she was well beyond reach of his custody; she had little to lose and much to gain. All she needed was his name and date of birth. But her mother defended this information as if it were a vital organ that Pip was trying to rip out of her.

But she was the one bold enough to invite him out for an after-meeting coffee (to be paid for by her, since he didn’t believe in money).

“But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole brand now: purity.” The word purity made Pip shudder.

Was there anything crueler, from the person who’d rejected you, than compassionate forbearance?

The father found work at the dockyards and did enough spying for the Soviets to stay in their good graces; Katya claimed to remember Kim Philby coming to dinner once.

Later on, after he saw the ghost, Andreas pursued the sport obsessively, practicing with his clubmates at the sports center and by himself at the Weberwiese, because he imagined himself as a star striker and it spared him from thinking about the ghost.

Ghost…?

Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

Then he heard the strangely childish and almost dear sounds of her throwing up. He didn’t feel sick himself. More like postorgasmic; immensely weary and even more immensely sad.

So much to unpack

It was no secret at DI that she and Tom had been a couple for more than a decade, but the two of them kept things professional at work.

How

Tom’s theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.

She could feel herself targeting Pip with her rant, losing her cool by way of attacking Pip’s noncommittal coolness, but there was an undercurrent of grievance with Tom as well. He’d told her, a long time ago, that he’d met Andreas Wolf in Berlin, back when he was still married. All he would say was that Wolf was a magnetic but troubled person, with secrets of his own. But the way he said it gave Leila the impression that Wolf had meant a great deal to Tom. Like Anabel, Wolf belonged to the dark core of Tom’s inner life, the pre-Leila history against which she contended. Because she appreciated that he didn’t poke and probe her, she didn’t poke or probe him. But she couldn’t help noticing how closely Tom guarded his memories of Wolf, and she felt some of the same competitive jealousy she did toward Anabel.

Total non-sequitur much????

The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

“A great job and a family doesn’t sound so bad to me.” “You should do something better with the guts you’ve got.” “I don’t usually think of myself as having guts.” “People with guts seldom do.”

She was disappointed that his truth had to do with him, not her.

🙄

In the windows was a pale gray Colorado morning sky of the sort from which she’d learned not to predict the afternoon weather—it could snow or turn shockingly warm—but she was grateful for the bright overcast; it matched her spirits.

“You rode the bus all day. I sat here waiting for you. Who has it worse? Who’s more pathetic?”

Oh god this is insufferable

I made this adjustment to my personality—and a hundred others like it in our early months together—and henceforth I peed sitting down whenever she could hear me. (When she couldn’t, though, I peed in her sink. The part of me that did this was the part that ultimately ruined us and saved me.)

I could have become a news editor there, or later at the Voice, but I didn’t want an office job, because some mornings, before closeting herself, Anabel needed to spend several hours discussing an incorrect look I’d given her or a disturbing news item that had slipped past my censoring, and I had to be available for that.

Are we still talking about weak men?

The smallest of questions (“Why did you wait ten minutes to tell me your good news instead of telling me immediately?”) triggered a full formal investigation, with every response filed in triplicate and the review period extended and re-extended while the archives were searched.

“Let’s work on your English accent,” I said. “My accent is flawless! I’m the son of an English professor.” “You sound like the BBC. You’ve got to flatten your a’s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve said a like an American. They’re one of the glories of our nation. Say can’t for me.” “Can’t.” “Aaaaa. Caaaan’t. Like a bleating goat.” “Caaaaan’t.” “There you go. The British have no concept of what they’re missing.”

At her invitation, he went to her flat for lunch on a rainy September Friday, four days before Al Qaeda’s masterstroke.

That is… one way to describe September 11th

“Nothing a person does out of love can be wrong.”

Andreas imagined people googling “tad milliken,” seeing “Andreas Wolf” and “statutory rape” on the first page of results, conflating his blondness and his line of work with the unfortunate orthographic proximity of “Andreas” to “Assange,” and receiving the subliminal impression that he had a thing for fifteen-year-olds. Which he no longer did.

…no longer

But there’s a place in the mountains, Los Volcanes. Used to be owned by a German guy who does ecological survey work. I’d hired him when I was thinking I could corner the world market in lithium.

Uh huh

“Consider this a free vacation in America,” he said. “I hate America,” she said. “I thought Obama would change things, but it’s still just guns, drones, Guantánamo.”

He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do.

“Leila misses me. Really. It’s not a problem that I’m your daughter?” “Sorry, hang on. I’m shutting the door.” There was a fumbling, a bonk, a rustle, a clunk. “Pip, sorry,” Tom said. “What are you telling me?” “I’m telling you I know everything.” “Yikey. OK.”