BookBrowse Reviews Purity by Jonathan Franzen

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A grand story filled with landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.

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Jonathan Franzen has often been labeled the Great American Novelist. The moniker is mostly accurate if one considers that Franzen consistently captures the contemporary American landscape, both through his stories' outsized ambition and their precise observations and execution. What's more, he seamlessly integrates plot with the larger issues of the day. Viewed through this lens, his latest book, Purity, is no different — student debt, the smothering ubiquity of the Internet, the growth of new media all get air time to absorbing effect in this vast and meticulously plotted novel.

At the heart of it all is Purity (Pip) Tyler, a newly minted graduate who is the product of suffocating mothering, as unsure of her place in the world as she is about her plans to be rid of the $130,000 she has in college loans before her life can truly take off. There's no help forthcoming from Mom, a recluse and a loner, who supplements her work as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store with her full-time job as an eternally needy barnacle attached to Pip. Pip is desperate to find out the identity of her father, if only for the practical reason that he might be able to help with her shaky financial situation.

Enter Andreas Wolf and his Sunlight project. A prominent East German dissident, Andreas Wolf is a Julian Assange-like character (see Beyond the Book) who has set up a few computer servers in Bolivia and has been shining the disinfecting power of "sunlight" by publishing a series of online exposes about societal atrocities. When Pip is offered an internship at the organization, she accepts for a deeply personal reason: she is hoping those powerful servers might be programmed and coaxed to yield the true identity of her father.

Pip is not naive enough to assume that she has been chosen from an endless pool of applicants on the basis of her personality alone. The actual reason slowly clicks into place as this deeply engaging story spirals outward to focus first on Tom Aberant, the founder and executive editor of Denver Independent, an online news magazine (that is modeled much after Propublica); Leila Helou, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and Tom's lover; and Anabel, Tom's manic ex-wife.

Franzen fluidly dissects the meaning of identity and the intersection between our online avatars and our flesh-and-blood realities. Likening the Internet to a new brand of totalitarianism, he shows how media narratives can warp reality to such an extent that the constructed persona begins to feel more real than the original person ever was. The stories we tell ourselves — and the ones we choose to present to society — bind us in unforgiving ways, Franzen implies. By the time Andreas Wolf wants to break out of his "save the world hero" mold, it is too late. "I'm not doing this job because I still believe in it," he says, "It's all about me now. It's my identity." In this and many other ways, it is the novel's particular brand of cynicism that is perhaps the most direct reflection of contemporary American society.

Similarities to that other Pip of Great Expectations surface in the characters' pursuit of ambition and their complicated relationship to wealth. The modern-day Pip Tyler of Purity is materialistic too; since she has no money, its absence looms large in her life. And Anabel wants nothing to do with the tainted money from her family's large inheritance.

It is difficult to overlook the fact that practically every woman in Purity is needy, shrill and insecure. Anabel in fact, is such a complicated piece of work that her ex-husband, gets "a PTSD thing" just looking at pictures of her. Leila, otherwise a successful and brilliant reporter, is framed mostly as a weakling who falls apart when jealousy gnaws at her insides. Then there are the manipulative mothers — Andreas' and Pip's, women who can't seem to develop a sense of identity independent of their place as matriarchs. Even Pip Tyler is not so much flesh-and-blood as one older guy's idea of what a young, twenty-something millennial should sound like: unmoored and adrift, attached to her mom, and in the end, the only "adult" in a roomful of them. It's tempting to label this treatment as misogyny but one only stops short because the men in the novel are also deeply flawed, if not as blaringly so.

Purity is studded with marvels of great writing: "He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry" or "Anabel came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions." One brilliant section, narrated in Tom's voice, details the journalist's relationship with the deeply disturbed rich Anabel, and is one of the novel's highlights, exploring the sheer absurdity of love in all its reckless abandon and glorious oblivion.

All said and done, Purity is a sharp contemporary story told well. Not Franzen's greatest but when the bar is set that high, even second best will do.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2015, and has been updated for the August 2016 edition. Click here to go to this issue.