Alex’s Reviews > Purity > Status Update

This is a fairly efficient story, and I hate pretty much all the characters, so it's engaging (it'd be a problem if I just didn't care about the characters). I like it, I feel like I'm being somewhat apologetic about it but I don't think it deserves that. Purity is a good book, even if it's not necessarily what I think a Novel should be.

It's been a long time since I read a book with this much plot. Maybe my literary values have been inverted, but it seems absolutely absurd.

So I'm curious about what everyone's problem with Franzen is. It seems to me maybe it's his attitude, that he is more of a pop fiction writer though he might claim to be literary. The only bad writing in here so far is the email conversations (I winced through them), but again, that's not a literary style. Otherwise the prose is unexceptional, but efficient. Thoughts?