"So many Jonathan's. A plague of literary Jonathan's. If you read the New York Times Book Review you'd think it was the most common male name in America." (207)
Purity is the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen and the third book I've read of his. Like Freedom and The Corrections, Purity features a cast of characters set against a familiar cultural backdrop all striving to become the virtue the title of the novel extols; free, correct, pure. Naturally human nature gets in the way of this, but the resulting read is always fascinating. Frankly, I didn't think Purity was as good as the Corrections and certainly not better than Freedom. The volume of characters and the amount of bloat that Franzen dedicates to filler characters makes it harder to feel anything for the really important and interesting ones. Subsequently it took longer to really reel me into the larger story. Nevertheless, Purity is essentially Franzen and essentially good.
While there is never exactly a main character in Franzen's novel there is usually one that the theme and plot circle around. Pip, whose real name is Purity, is a young millennial riddled with millennial problems; saddled with 100k + in student debt, socially conscious working for corporate America, higher education promising high and a real world delivering low, the product of a single parent. We meet Pip as she is talking to her megalomanic mother about her need for money and imploring her to disclose who her real father is. The adventure that follows this opening scene sees Pip getting involved in a Wikileaks like organization called the Sunlight Project and an investigative journalist organization called DI, but not always through the perspective of Pip. We get backstory and context that ranges from life in East Berlin in the 1980s to New York to Bolivia. This is all coupled with Franzen's characteristic inclusion of current events; Julian Assange is there, the NSA, Google, Obama, feminism, the Californian drought, Snowden, Facebook, they are all there along side their predecessors in the 1980's. Whether Franzen, making a larger point about the world around us by putting a microscope on his characters, is looking to explain the modern political climate or document its effect is difficult to determine, but it's fun to think about and read into.
At the same time, this is where Franzen has always been the most tedious. I would never criticize a book for being long unless it is so unnecessarily. Franzen's Purity can be excessively self-referential; anything from his career as a writer (see the above quotes) to his political views is found far too often and far too obviously. A work of fiction that paints characters into a larger political tapestry has to avoid the pitfall of becoming a dumping ground of opinion. Franzen fails to resist this urge too many times. The clarity and moral turpitude with which Franzen's characters perfectly summarize any ideology such as feminism or socialism, capitalism or journalistic integrity, punctuates the narrative with protruding, unrealistic sound bites. He might stop short of turning his character's into Ayn Rand like mouth pieces for a deeper philosophy, but the inconsistency distracts from an otherwise great story. Watch as what was good dialogue devolves into Franzen opinion;
"I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations" Anabel said darkly
"But the alternative doesn't work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing project, you get the teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that's the sphere the journalist is supposed to live". (365)
This, and many other sections like it, are not complicated enough, too one sided. Not even 10 pages after this exchange we see the same characters battling it out over whether or not a man should have to sit down when going to the bathroom. The exchange is messy, but real. Manufactured messiness is a gift that Franzen uses well, we get flawed logic ("but I have to sit down") and manipulation; "she proceeded to cry torrentially. The only way I could get her to stop was to become, right then and there, a person who experienced as keenly as she did the unfairness of my being able to pee standing up". It seems that Franzen himself works best in the tension between two sides, it's when he explicitly takes one when you wonder what the hell he is doing.
I've always thought that Franzen should worry less about expressing himself and spend more time existing in the complicated. Part of the fun is extrapolating the themes from his novels and the flawed characters, fun that is spoiled when we're given the right answer. At its heart, Purity is about secrets, how the existence of secrets make up our identities and yet we have an obsession with appearing pure, of looking like we have none. It's a difficult subject to explore through fiction. When Franzen is on, and he is on through most of this novel, his exploration is fun, emotional, and thought provoking. He should be given more credit as a world builder, even though he works within the world we already know, few living fictional authors better capture what it means to live in it (assuming, of course, you're white...). It's no secret this book is a modern take on Great Expectations (Pip?), but whether this is Dickensian or not, there is no living author quite like Franzen. We should all look forward to his next attempt at the great American novel.
