I am amenable to Franzen as a talented novelist. That sounds a bit dismissive but it is, in essence, the overall narrative arc of the novel. There are complications, a murder in East Germany, secrets revealed and then a rather quiet end. As the story unfolds we begin to see unexpected connections between Pip, her mother, Andreas, Charles, Tom, and Leila. (This triangle is far more interesting than the attention it receives in the novel but it is also not at all the point of the novel.)įranzen is willing to show the reader just how much he knows about his characters with back stories that are, at times, far more compelling than the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Then we move on to the other characters: A chance encounter leads Pip to an internship in Bolivia with Andreas Wolf, a German ex-pat and creator of something called The Sunshine Project, which is similar to WikiLeaks ( Purity is, if nothing else, frantically reaching for the zeitgeist).įrom there Pip finds her way to a job with an online magazine in Denver where she lives with a group of adults involved in a complicated affair: Leila, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, her husband Charles, a moderately successful novelist, and Leila's editor and lover, Tom. She's saddled with student debt (as if her creator had studied a few popular magazines and websites in order to understand the condition of today's young people), works odd jobs, and struggles to separate herself from an overbearing and possibly insane mother. At the outset of this one, we meet Pip (hello, Charles Dickens), a recent college graduate who is clever and ambitious, but aimless. What Franzen does well in every novel is to tell a sprawling story with a robust and intimately rendered casts of characters. With a title like Purity, Jonathan Franzen's latest novel sets the reader up for great expectations, and how. Author Interviews Jonathan Franzen On Writing: It's An 'Escape From Everything'
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