Excerpt from Purity by Jonathan Franzen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I don't know. Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There's no fooling a taste bud, in my experience."

"Sugar has an aftertaste, too," Pip said, although she knew that argument was futile.

"Sugar has a sour aftertaste that the taste bud has no problem with, because it's built to report sourness without dwelling on it. The taste bud doesn't have to spend five hours registering strangeness, strangeness! Which was what happened to me the one time I drank a stevia drink."

"But I'm saying the sourness does linger."

"There's something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That's what stevia tastes like to me."

"I'm not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that's what you're trying to say."

"I'm saying I don't need a cake."

"No, I'll find a different kind of cake. I'm sorry I suggested a kind that's poison to you."

"I didn't say it was poison. It's simply that stevia does something funny—"

"To your mouth chemistry, yeah."

"Pussycat, I'll eat whatever kind of cake you bring me, refined sugar won't kill me, I didn't mean to upset you. Sweetheart, please."

No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched. The problem, as Pip saw it—the essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything—was that she loved her mother. Pitied her; suffered with her; warmed to the sound of her voice; felt an unsettling kind of nonsexual attraction to her body; was solicitous even of her mouth chemistry; wished her greater happiness; hated upsetting her; found her dear. This was the massive block of granite at the center of her life, the source of all the anger and sarcasm that she directed not only at her mother but, more and more self-defeatingly of late, at less appropriate objects. When Pip got angry, it wasn't really at her mother but at the granite block.

Excerpted from Purity by Jonathan Franzen. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Franzen. All rights reserved.