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Purity
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Fiction (2015)A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters – Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers – and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters – Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers – and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
563 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2015
About the author
Jonathan Franzen
89 books9,185 followersJonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion; and two works of nonfiction, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, all published by FSG. His fourth novel, Freedom, was published in the fall of 2010.
Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (1996), the Salon Book Award (2001), the New York Times Best Books of the Year (2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2002).
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonath...
Franzen's other honors include a 1988 Whiting Writers' Award, Granta's Best Of Young American Novelists (1996), the Salon Book Award (2001), the New York Times Best Books of the Year (2001), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (2002).
http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonath...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,040 reviews
June 14, 2018
i don't even know what to say in this review - it's a big book by a big author so there's not going to be any shortage of reviews for it, both on here and in the greater world.
but me, i just didn't like it.
and that surprised me. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i liked it a lot. this one sounded like such a crazy departure from franzen's general small-scope but deep-focus take on themes of marriage and family and other interpersonal relationships (i mean, revolutionaries in the jungle??? franzen??), that i thought it would be really fun to see what he did with it.
unfortunately, what he did with it was to bore me and make me feel uncomfortable all at once.
jonathan franzen gets a lot of flak for being some kind of john updike redux, a less jewy philip roth; the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying "oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!" and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler.
in terms of the characters in this book, every mother is a bad mother, and they are the cause of sexual dysfunction/deviancy in their sons, most women have daddy issues, are hypersexualized and throw themselves at older men, the most "ooh-rah feminism" character is a mentally unstable narcissist with sexual hangups, prone to embarrassing political exhibitionist displays and so emasculating to her boyfriend that she makes him pee sitting down.
as for the racial elements - part of the book takes place in bolivia. bolivia! distant lands! and yet the focus is somehow upon a bunch of germans and entitled white trust fund kids hiding out in cultish servitude to their assange-y leader, exposing the secrets of dirty corporations and governments, and all the novel's non-white characters, in bolivia or elsewhere, are drivers or gardeners or mentally challenged.
this has to be intentional, right? franzen is too deliberate an author to not be trying to provoke his critics and sustain their complaints with this, right??
i'm not the usually the one to complain about "how women are portrayed in novels"; that's not top of the list of what i read books for. you tell me a good story, and i can overlook the fact that your characters (male or female) are not well-rounded or good role models or a little stereotyped. i don't have any expectations for male novelists to write convincing and thoughtful female characters as long as the story itself is strong. but here - there are only so many different versions of damaged and vulnerable, but not sympathetic, women with a propensity to fling themselves sexually at older men you can encounter before it starts feeling like reading someone's penthouse forum submission. once you see it you can't stop seeing it, and in a 600-page book, sometimes you just want a little variety.
there's just so much toxic hatred running through this book. so many horrible people, so many unsettling situations; it taints the entire book. the title is ironic, obviously, but reading this made me feel very unclean. it's weird- i'm not usually turned off by toxic, either. there was just something about this book that made me unhappy, and every time i went to pick it back up again, i had to brace myself for it, a little.
i don't even feel like writing any more about this - franzen isn't a bad writer at all and he managed to flesh out an impressive number of sprawling storylines here and there's a lot that is admirable, but the overall reading experience was so off-putting for me; not just the unpleasantness, but also how frequently boring and bloated the book was. my strong reaction to the book means it was effective at something at least, especially since the turn-offs here don't typically turn me off, so at least i learned something about myself, but i'm not happy about it.
and neither is maggie.
come to my blog!
but me, i just didn't like it.
and that surprised me. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i liked it a lot. this one sounded like such a crazy departure from franzen's general small-scope but deep-focus take on themes of marriage and family and other interpersonal relationships (i mean, revolutionaries in the jungle??? franzen??), that i thought it would be really fun to see what he did with it.
unfortunately, what he did with it was to bore me and make me feel uncomfortable all at once.
jonathan franzen gets a lot of flak for being some kind of john updike redux, a less jewy philip roth; the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying "oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!" and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler.
in terms of the characters in this book, every mother is a bad mother, and they are the cause of sexual dysfunction/deviancy in their sons, most women have daddy issues, are hypersexualized and throw themselves at older men, the most "ooh-rah feminism" character is a mentally unstable narcissist with sexual hangups, prone to embarrassing political exhibitionist displays and so emasculating to her boyfriend that she makes him pee sitting down.
as for the racial elements - part of the book takes place in bolivia. bolivia! distant lands! and yet the focus is somehow upon a bunch of germans and entitled white trust fund kids hiding out in cultish servitude to their assange-y leader, exposing the secrets of dirty corporations and governments, and all the novel's non-white characters, in bolivia or elsewhere, are drivers or gardeners or mentally challenged.
this has to be intentional, right? franzen is too deliberate an author to not be trying to provoke his critics and sustain their complaints with this, right??
i'm not the usually the one to complain about "how women are portrayed in novels"; that's not top of the list of what i read books for. you tell me a good story, and i can overlook the fact that your characters (male or female) are not well-rounded or good role models or a little stereotyped. i don't have any expectations for male novelists to write convincing and thoughtful female characters as long as the story itself is strong. but here - there are only so many different versions of damaged and vulnerable, but not sympathetic, women with a propensity to fling themselves sexually at older men you can encounter before it starts feeling like reading someone's penthouse forum submission. once you see it you can't stop seeing it, and in a 600-page book, sometimes you just want a little variety.
there's just so much toxic hatred running through this book. so many horrible people, so many unsettling situations; it taints the entire book. the title is ironic, obviously, but reading this made me feel very unclean. it's weird- i'm not usually turned off by toxic, either. there was just something about this book that made me unhappy, and every time i went to pick it back up again, i had to brace myself for it, a little.
i don't even feel like writing any more about this - franzen isn't a bad writer at all and he managed to flesh out an impressive number of sprawling storylines here and there's a lot that is admirable, but the overall reading experience was so off-putting for me; not just the unpleasantness, but also how frequently boring and bloated the book was. my strong reaction to the book means it was effective at something at least, especially since the turn-offs here don't typically turn me off, so at least i learned something about myself, but i'm not happy about it.
and neither is maggie.
come to my blog!
August 22, 2015
There is a brilliant novel buried in the some indulgent furious prose that is full of contempt for the reader. I really enjoyed the brilliant novel and wished the indulgence has been excised. Full review on NPR next week.
October 8, 2015
Up till now, I’ve defended Jonathan Franzen. That’s despite his skirmishes with Oprah and Jennifer Weiner, his curmudgeonly comments about social media and his bizarre statement about adopting an Iraqi war orphan to understand millennials.
The author of The Corrections and Freedom can write. Who cares what people who don’t read his books – and only troll Twitter – think?
But now I’m reconsidering.
His new novel is ponderous, bloated and tin-eared. Something’s wrong when a book only gets going at the 400-page mark.
There are four main characters. Pip Tyler, a cynical, underemployed young woman, is drowning in student debt and doesn’t know who her parents are – although she’s still in touch with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother, who won’t reveal her own real name or date of birth. Wily, charismatic Andreas Wolf grew up in East Germany before starting a Wikileaks-like project in Bolivia. Leila Helou is a Lebanese-American journalist who’s married to an aging novelist and soon begins work for a privately funded online news publication. And Tom Aberant owns that publication and is Leila’s lover.
Slowly, oh so slowly, the connections between these people start to appear, but only after endless exposition that doesn’t further the plot and adds only slightly to character. There are so many detours, including a weird meta passage about famous American writers named “Jonathan,” that the temptation to give up is strong.
Thematically, the book is rich in ideas about innocence and the cost of freedom – whether economic or political. The material about life under the Stasi and then German reunification is fascinating and more ambitious than anything else Franzen’s attempted.
But the characters, even Pip and her not-so-great expectations, are as wooden as the pieces on a chessboard. And I can’t believe an editor let words like “huffingly,” “self-hatingly” and – most egregious – “full-chestedly anorexic” slip through.
In the same spirit, this book isn't just bad, it's huffingly, eye-rollingly bad.
**
Originally published in NOW Magazine here
The author of The Corrections and Freedom can write. Who cares what people who don’t read his books – and only troll Twitter – think?
But now I’m reconsidering.
His new novel is ponderous, bloated and tin-eared. Something’s wrong when a book only gets going at the 400-page mark.
There are four main characters. Pip Tyler, a cynical, underemployed young woman, is drowning in student debt and doesn’t know who her parents are – although she’s still in touch with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother, who won’t reveal her own real name or date of birth. Wily, charismatic Andreas Wolf grew up in East Germany before starting a Wikileaks-like project in Bolivia. Leila Helou is a Lebanese-American journalist who’s married to an aging novelist and soon begins work for a privately funded online news publication. And Tom Aberant owns that publication and is Leila’s lover.
Slowly, oh so slowly, the connections between these people start to appear, but only after endless exposition that doesn’t further the plot and adds only slightly to character. There are so many detours, including a weird meta passage about famous American writers named “Jonathan,” that the temptation to give up is strong.
Thematically, the book is rich in ideas about innocence and the cost of freedom – whether economic or political. The material about life under the Stasi and then German reunification is fascinating and more ambitious than anything else Franzen’s attempted.
But the characters, even Pip and her not-so-great expectations, are as wooden as the pieces on a chessboard. And I can’t believe an editor let words like “huffingly,” “self-hatingly” and – most egregious – “full-chestedly anorexic” slip through.
In the same spirit, this book isn't just bad, it's huffingly, eye-rollingly bad.
**
Originally published in NOW Magazine here
September 3, 2015
Yikes... Almighty! Ambitious....and utterly engrossing!!! I say 'mostly' ....not with a negative slant ....but because there were several times where I paused -- ( I just needed to sit
and think about what was written). When I had natural reading breaks....(driving in a car, acupuncture session, swimming, etc. ).... my thoughts were still with this book.
Jonathan Franzen is an immensely gifted writer. Plus, contemporary fiction --is a
genre I enjoy. However, this book may not be for everyone: It's long, with complex - multi-layered characters -plots and subplots - and many 'issue-themes'. Not all characters are likable - not at all times anyway. Die-hard feminists might take some offense....and readers who want
to feel cozy satisfied -immediately- might grow impatient with this novel. THAT is the worse
that might happen. Characters will be introduced. We stay with them long enough to feel
emotionally connected.... only to have them drop away for a while ...(I missed them),... But I knew they would come back. In the meantime, ... I got to know another group of characters and began to get emotionally attached to them. By being patient... All these characters tie in
and intertwine. All the while... the story is growing more complex.
ME: I can't get enough of Jonathan Franzen. I ADORE THIS NOVEL!!! He's an author who has me think - and keep thinking deeper and deeper. If Jonathan Franzen was offering a week-end workshop -discussion group (hint hint), here in Santa Cruz.., I'd sign up and pay a couple hundred dollars to be in it! I think there is THAT MUCH VALUE to be found - discovered - and discussed in this new novel.
One of the things that I loved so much about "The Corrections", "Freedom", and now
"Purity", is that not only do I always smile DEEPLY - throughout the novel- sometimes
laughing hysterically to myself- or find myself shaking my head and talking back to the characters-
but in each of these novels, I feel as if EACH CHARACTER could benefit from therapy. ( haha)
What I mean by that...I could talk about 'each character' in this story -- ( analyze the hell out of them, lol) ---for at least a full hour, if not longer. Nobody does character 'study' ...( for lack of a better way of saying this), than Jonathan Franzen.
A little about the story itself:
Purity Tyler, College Grad, ...( she goes by 'Pip'), is in her 20's, living in Oakland, California (where I was born),
She owes the government $130,000 from student loans. At the start of the novel she has a very un-satisfying job working for "Renewable Solutions".
"she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out then she was asked to sell something else".
"Renewable Solutions" didn't make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes
seemingly hourly), it "bundled" it "brokered", it "captured", it "surveyed", it "client-provided."
"In theory, this was all very worthy". In other words the nightmare sales calls we all
hate getting!
Thank heavens... (not without problems though, of course), Pip, soon gets offered another job. More money - pay off those student loans- travel - opportunity! YIPPY!!! .... and the plot & subplots only get thicker.
But wait... I've left out a few juicy parts before we move on to Pip's new job.
1) her crazy living conditions and housemates in Oakland...and her relationship with each of them....(you'll have to read the book to dive in deeper to this messy situation)
And
2) Pit has a mother ( no father - no other siblings- not even a pet - or TV). Her mother lives in
a small cabin in the mountains in Felton ( a small town in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz)... where Pip grew up ....( without that TV, pet, father, or sibling).
Pip tells us early-- that her mother is the only person she truly trusts in life -yet her mother won't
tell her who her Father is. Pip's mother won't reveal her real name, nor her 'real' birthday. Yep, this is person, Pip trusts most in the world.
I've not even scratched the surface of this novel. Like I said... I could review each character for hours --- let alone begin to explain the BRILLIANT - COMPLEX -story!!!
There is a murder ...but not a 'mystery-murder'.... a'cover-your-ass-murder'.
Lots and lots of secrets. Hell, everyone in this story has a secret. It makes you wonder...
about secrets. I've been thinking about 'secrets' from many sides, situations, points I'd views.
Do most people have a secret or two? If you decide to share a secret with a person, (friend, perhaps), how do you feel after? Does sharing a secret create more intimacy with the person you're sharing it with? What secrets might never be told?
There were secrets in this story - where I felt would benefit the characters 'to' exchange.
Their were other secrets, where I felt it was foolish to tell anyone.
If I looked at this book simply by 'themes' or 'issues' to discuss...
These are the ones that stand out for me...( there might be more)
...Feelings of being Trapped: trapped in no end jobs, trapped by the hold somebody has over you, trapped from 'within'... haunted self-identity self- esteem
....lies and manipulation ( speaks for itself)
...marriage: intensity, trauma, sex, competition between partners, caregivers, affairs, abandonment, guilt, urgency of workloads,
...., divorce
..... Children: to have them or not... Or the power play between parents with their child
....mother/daughter relationship...,, mother/son relationship ...
Single parenting
.... Seduction.....(used as a weapon? Personal gain? Political advancement? )
...envy & jealousy
.... Self pity and anxiety
..... Paranoid
..... The Internet and the role of technology and social media today. A look at transparency vs.
secrecy. How the role of journalism has changed since the Internet.
....Purity I think the title of this book could be looked at many ways also.
....Morals
.....Pip's name... There is a lot of other symbolism to the name mixed throughout.
Other Characters for your brain and soul to do somersaults with are:
Andreas Wolf: He is king- of- manipulation --( woman hang on him type of guy), owner of Sunlight Projects...computer company. Pip will end up working for him - first in California - near Santa Cruz a later in Bolivia. Wolf is originally from East Germany.
Annagret: ...she also worked for Wolf at one time- introduced Pip to Wolf. -created the job for her.
Stephen/ Jason: both of these men live in Oakland.
Ruben adopted son
Horst - a stepfather
Annabel - struggling artist and filmmaker
Tom Aberant - lives with Leila - in Denver- runs online investigative journalism site
Leila Heluo... Journalists... I'd call her the strongest feminist in the book.
Edward Snowden & Julian Assange -computer hackers
etc etc etc.
I highly recommend this book for cerebral dysfunctional Book lovers.... who enjoy a good laugh or two! Guess that's me!
and think about what was written). When I had natural reading breaks....(driving in a car, acupuncture session, swimming, etc. ).... my thoughts were still with this book.
Jonathan Franzen is an immensely gifted writer. Plus, contemporary fiction --is a
genre I enjoy. However, this book may not be for everyone: It's long, with complex - multi-layered characters -plots and subplots - and many 'issue-themes'. Not all characters are likable - not at all times anyway. Die-hard feminists might take some offense....and readers who want
to feel cozy satisfied -immediately- might grow impatient with this novel. THAT is the worse
that might happen. Characters will be introduced. We stay with them long enough to feel
emotionally connected.... only to have them drop away for a while ...(I missed them),... But I knew they would come back. In the meantime, ... I got to know another group of characters and began to get emotionally attached to them. By being patient... All these characters tie in
and intertwine. All the while... the story is growing more complex.
ME: I can't get enough of Jonathan Franzen. I ADORE THIS NOVEL!!! He's an author who has me think - and keep thinking deeper and deeper. If Jonathan Franzen was offering a week-end workshop -discussion group (hint hint), here in Santa Cruz.., I'd sign up and pay a couple hundred dollars to be in it! I think there is THAT MUCH VALUE to be found - discovered - and discussed in this new novel.
One of the things that I loved so much about "The Corrections", "Freedom", and now
"Purity", is that not only do I always smile DEEPLY - throughout the novel- sometimes
laughing hysterically to myself- or find myself shaking my head and talking back to the characters-
but in each of these novels, I feel as if EACH CHARACTER could benefit from therapy. ( haha)
What I mean by that...I could talk about 'each character' in this story -- ( analyze the hell out of them, lol) ---for at least a full hour, if not longer. Nobody does character 'study' ...( for lack of a better way of saying this), than Jonathan Franzen.
A little about the story itself:
Purity Tyler, College Grad, ...( she goes by 'Pip'), is in her 20's, living in Oakland, California (where I was born),
She owes the government $130,000 from student loans. At the start of the novel she has a very un-satisfying job working for "Renewable Solutions".
"she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out then she was asked to sell something else".
"Renewable Solutions" didn't make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes
seemingly hourly), it "bundled" it "brokered", it "captured", it "surveyed", it "client-provided."
"In theory, this was all very worthy". In other words the nightmare sales calls we all
hate getting!
Thank heavens... (not without problems though, of course), Pip, soon gets offered another job. More money - pay off those student loans- travel - opportunity! YIPPY!!! .... and the plot & subplots only get thicker.
But wait... I've left out a few juicy parts before we move on to Pip's new job.
1) her crazy living conditions and housemates in Oakland...and her relationship with each of them....(you'll have to read the book to dive in deeper to this messy situation)
And
2) Pit has a mother ( no father - no other siblings- not even a pet - or TV). Her mother lives in
a small cabin in the mountains in Felton ( a small town in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz)... where Pip grew up ....( without that TV, pet, father, or sibling).
Pip tells us early-- that her mother is the only person she truly trusts in life -yet her mother won't
tell her who her Father is. Pip's mother won't reveal her real name, nor her 'real' birthday. Yep, this is person, Pip trusts most in the world.
I've not even scratched the surface of this novel. Like I said... I could review each character for hours --- let alone begin to explain the BRILLIANT - COMPLEX -story!!!
There is a murder ...but not a 'mystery-murder'.... a'cover-your-ass-murder'.
Lots and lots of secrets. Hell, everyone in this story has a secret. It makes you wonder...
about secrets. I've been thinking about 'secrets' from many sides, situations, points I'd views.
Do most people have a secret or two? If you decide to share a secret with a person, (friend, perhaps), how do you feel after? Does sharing a secret create more intimacy with the person you're sharing it with? What secrets might never be told?
There were secrets in this story - where I felt would benefit the characters 'to' exchange.
Their were other secrets, where I felt it was foolish to tell anyone.
If I looked at this book simply by 'themes' or 'issues' to discuss...
These are the ones that stand out for me...( there might be more)
...Feelings of being Trapped: trapped in no end jobs, trapped by the hold somebody has over you, trapped from 'within'... haunted self-identity self- esteem
....lies and manipulation ( speaks for itself)
...marriage: intensity, trauma, sex, competition between partners, caregivers, affairs, abandonment, guilt, urgency of workloads,
...., divorce
..... Children: to have them or not... Or the power play between parents with their child
....mother/daughter relationship...,, mother/son relationship ...
Single parenting
.... Seduction.....(used as a weapon? Personal gain? Political advancement? )
...envy & jealousy
.... Self pity and anxiety
..... Paranoid
..... The Internet and the role of technology and social media today. A look at transparency vs.
secrecy. How the role of journalism has changed since the Internet.
....Purity I think the title of this book could be looked at many ways also.
....Morals
.....Pip's name... There is a lot of other symbolism to the name mixed throughout.
Other Characters for your brain and soul to do somersaults with are:
Andreas Wolf: He is king- of- manipulation --( woman hang on him type of guy), owner of Sunlight Projects...computer company. Pip will end up working for him - first in California - near Santa Cruz a later in Bolivia. Wolf is originally from East Germany.
Annagret: ...she also worked for Wolf at one time- introduced Pip to Wolf. -created the job for her.
Stephen/ Jason: both of these men live in Oakland.
Ruben adopted son
Horst - a stepfather
Annabel - struggling artist and filmmaker
Tom Aberant - lives with Leila - in Denver- runs online investigative journalism site
Leila Heluo... Journalists... I'd call her the strongest feminist in the book.
Edward Snowden & Julian Assange -computer hackers
etc etc etc.
I highly recommend this book for cerebral dysfunctional Book lovers.... who enjoy a good laugh or two! Guess that's me!
March 7, 2016
Franzen’s novels now have a recognisable formula. The passing of the narrative baton between several characters who collectively will tell a family history. Some have said this novel is a departure from his familiar familial territory – but I didn’t see that at all. This is another novel about a family, or, more accurately, two families. I continually felt like I was reading an inferior version of Freedom and The Corrections (both novels I loved). Some have seen it as an attack on the internet. I didn’t really see that either. I was rather dreading some kind of repeat of Eggers’ soulless sterile propaganda attempt at warning us about the nefarious nature of social media. Purity has been praised for “rejecting the American dream of individuals as authors of their own destiny” but this is hardly ground-breaking as a theme: what good contemporary American writer hasn’t shown us the other side of the Gatsby coin?
If there’s a subtext in this novel it might be decoded as “everyone needs a dad because mothers are a bloody nightmare.”
You could say Purity is essentially about squabbling. Everyone is squabbling with everyone else – usually after a brief hiatus of requited love. The main problem for me though was the characters. The pulse they provided was often so thin that several times the novel was on the verge of dying. It wasn’t until Annabel arrived (around page 370) that finally the novel acquired a stronger heartbeat.
The novel begins (badly) with Pip. Pip is pretty obnoxious and insubstantial. Pip is squabbling with the entire world. To counteract her lack of charm and depth Franzen gives her a mystery. She has been brought up by a Miss Havisham mother who refuses to tell her who her father is. (The rather heavy handed parallels with Great Expectations were like a joke I didn’t get.)
The second voice is Andreas Wolf. He is squabbling with his mother. He too doesn’t know who his father is. I’m not sure why Franzen repeated this theme. Reminded me of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night where everyone is shooting each other in the first 100 pages as if Fitzgerald liked the idea so much he couldn’t stop using it. The novel stands or falls on Wolf as he is central to the bigger picture Franzen is presenting. Through Wolf Franzen connects the surveillance culture of the eastern Bloc with modern day internet privacy issues. But Wolf was all pasteboard melodrama for me. The more we were told about him the less believable he became. His story is pinched from McEwan’s The Innocent. It felt like Franzen is too conservative in his bones to convincingly create such a psychotic misfit. Half way through Wolf’s story I knew this novel wasn’t going to work.
The third voice is Tom. Tom is like another, more domesticated version of Andreas. Except he’s an investigative journalist. This was where Franzen might have contrasted internet whistleblowing with rigorous well-researched investigative journalism but at no point do we see Tom investigating anything that might be deemed important. At the end of the day his attempts at enlightening the world appear no more laudable than Andreas’. The best part of the novel though is without question his dysfunctional relationship with his wife, Annabel. Finally Franzen seemed to have hold of his characters and command of his material.
But this is a mean-spirited flabby ponderous novel that not even the fabulously absurd but well meaning Annabel could rescue.
Should also be said that Pip’s moral transformation, unlike her Dickens’ counterpart, takes place offstage so there’s a sense of being cheated out of any dramatic denouement.
The high level of my expectation, my great expectations, no doubt contributed to the level of my disappointment. The Corrections was a great novel; Freedom was even better. I’m sure Franzen will write another great novel but this certainly isn’t it.
If there’s a subtext in this novel it might be decoded as “everyone needs a dad because mothers are a bloody nightmare.”
You could say Purity is essentially about squabbling. Everyone is squabbling with everyone else – usually after a brief hiatus of requited love. The main problem for me though was the characters. The pulse they provided was often so thin that several times the novel was on the verge of dying. It wasn’t until Annabel arrived (around page 370) that finally the novel acquired a stronger heartbeat.
The novel begins (badly) with Pip. Pip is pretty obnoxious and insubstantial. Pip is squabbling with the entire world. To counteract her lack of charm and depth Franzen gives her a mystery. She has been brought up by a Miss Havisham mother who refuses to tell her who her father is. (The rather heavy handed parallels with Great Expectations were like a joke I didn’t get.)
The second voice is Andreas Wolf. He is squabbling with his mother. He too doesn’t know who his father is. I’m not sure why Franzen repeated this theme. Reminded me of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night where everyone is shooting each other in the first 100 pages as if Fitzgerald liked the idea so much he couldn’t stop using it. The novel stands or falls on Wolf as he is central to the bigger picture Franzen is presenting. Through Wolf Franzen connects the surveillance culture of the eastern Bloc with modern day internet privacy issues. But Wolf was all pasteboard melodrama for me. The more we were told about him the less believable he became. His story is pinched from McEwan’s The Innocent. It felt like Franzen is too conservative in his bones to convincingly create such a psychotic misfit. Half way through Wolf’s story I knew this novel wasn’t going to work.
The third voice is Tom. Tom is like another, more domesticated version of Andreas. Except he’s an investigative journalist. This was where Franzen might have contrasted internet whistleblowing with rigorous well-researched investigative journalism but at no point do we see Tom investigating anything that might be deemed important. At the end of the day his attempts at enlightening the world appear no more laudable than Andreas’. The best part of the novel though is without question his dysfunctional relationship with his wife, Annabel. Finally Franzen seemed to have hold of his characters and command of his material.
But this is a mean-spirited flabby ponderous novel that not even the fabulously absurd but well meaning Annabel could rescue.
Should also be said that Pip’s moral transformation, unlike her Dickens’ counterpart, takes place offstage so there’s a sense of being cheated out of any dramatic denouement.
The high level of my expectation, my great expectations, no doubt contributed to the level of my disappointment. The Corrections was a great novel; Freedom was even better. I’m sure Franzen will write another great novel but this certainly isn’t it.
September 10, 2016
"So many Jonathans. A Plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.”
- Jonathan Franzen, Purity
I went into this novel with the same trepidation I approach with all of Jonathan Franzen's novels. I admire his talent. Generally, enjoy his fiction, style, and prose, but also end up worn out and wrung out after reading them. Both The Corrections and Freedom exhausted me with the struggle. The Kampf of Kinder. His prose in those two novels was amazing at times and alternately clunkish. The characters were fascinating but could also turn quickly into cartoons. The plot and narrative in both were kinda sluggish. It was like a nature hike through an overgrown wood. Lots of leafy prose to appreciate, but moving forward was kinda a pain in the ass.
His debut novel The Twenty-Seventh City had more narrative thrust, but the plot was a bit labyrinthine. It moved, but you just seemed a bit dazed after. Talent was there. Excess of young potential and talent really, but unbridled, messy, unrestrained.
'Purity' seems to give us a faster-paced, more plot-driven family novel. So, some of the excesses of his last two novels seem to be trimmed (yes, I'm talking about ze sex, but we will get to that). It also is less of a puzzle. Even the structure was clean and clear. So, while I think this might be Franzen's most enjoyable novel to-date, I'd still rank 'The Corrections' as his best (despite its flaws). If that doesn't make sense (and It might just be me), I'm really sorry. Truly. I have a history of mixed signals. I think Pynchon's Mason and Dixon is his most enjoyable novel, even though I think Against the Day is a superior book. Anyway, I do digress.
Let's get back to the structure of this novel. Franzen gives hints at his plan with this novel with way he divides the novel. The novel is divided thus:
Section 1: Purity in Oakland; perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
Section 2: The Republic of Bad Taste; perspective = Andreas Wolf
Section 3: Too Much Information; perspective = Leila Helou
Section 4: Moonglow Dairy: perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
Section 5: [lelo9n8aOrd]: perspective = Tom Aberant
Section 6: The Killer; perspective = Andreas Wolf
Section 7: The Rain Comes; perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
So, just in case the title doesn't give it away, this novel is PIP's. She is the actual beginning, middle and end of this story. But Andreas Wolf is the anti-hero, the counterpoint, the response to Pip's call. The ebb to her flow?
So here are my three main gripes about the book. The reason for the missing star.
FRANZEN'S LIBS
Some of my old gripes about Franzen still exist. Sometimes, I can't decide if he exists in an obnoxious liberal fairy tale, or is just really good writing about liberal fairy tales. If I was a betting man, I'd lay a Billion he gets a kick out of all his blatant self-parody. Franzen seems über self-aware and seems to enjoy using Pip's mom to poke a bit of fun at the extreme end of the cartoonish, obnoxious, west coast liberal... but at other times Franzen himself seems to fully embody and gloat in this same cartoon. It wasn't obnoxious enough to distract me for long from the novel, and look I'm a pretty liberal guy myself, but sometimes Franzen's approach to capitalism, feminism, privacy, animal rights and global warming seems a bit clumsy. Perhaps, it might just all be me.
FRANZEN + SEX
Also, I could say the same thing about Franzen and sex. To be fair, most writers can't write about sex. They either take themselves way too seriously or not seriously enough. Franzen seems a bit more comfortable writing about spanking the monkey (perhaps that is the danger of being a writer) than sex between man and woman (or woman and woman, or man and man). But, that said, his awkward sex scenes were mostly ALL supposed to be awkward. These aren't healthy adult couples manifesting their love or desire for another person through physical contact. These are issues of power, control, obsession, Oedipal longing, etc. So, like his writing about the liberal extremities, I can't quite decide if his writing about sex is perfectly awkward or just awkward. It is a bit like watching Andy Kaufman. You aren't sure when he is joking or if the joke is on you. He just doesn't see to have grown much past his Freedom days. Yes, you all know what I mean: "the hot, hungry microcosm of Patti's c#nt". See? I can't even write it or not write it without barfing and giggling at the same time.
FRANZEN & WOMEN
Sometimes when I read Franzen writing about women, or as a woman (read PIP), I'm reminded of that fantastic Jack Nicholson's quip from 'As Good As It Gets'. Except...AGAIN I'm not sure if Franzen is doing this on purpose. Perhaps, the whole reason I gave this book only four stars is the one star is all about my uncertainty. Is Franzen truly a dick or is he just playing with the idea of being a dick? I dunno. For sure he isn't folding to Jennifer Weiner's attack on his prickish prose.
So, I guess that is what I'm asking. Is Franzen's prose pose about women, sex, liberals a put on or is it just Franzen being Franzen? I'm not sure. And to be fair, I'm not sure I really care. In a lot of ways it is like Mailer being Mailer. Did I ever want Norman Mailer to start wearing cardigans and sticking his pinky out while drinking mixed drinks? Hell no. I liked Franzen's book. And while I've set out my three little gripes, they weren't THAT big. I don't want them to seem more than what they were. I'd probably find a couple reasons to bitch about Ecclesiastes too.
- Jonathan Franzen, Purity
I went into this novel with the same trepidation I approach with all of Jonathan Franzen's novels. I admire his talent. Generally, enjoy his fiction, style, and prose, but also end up worn out and wrung out after reading them. Both The Corrections and Freedom exhausted me with the struggle. The Kampf of Kinder. His prose in those two novels was amazing at times and alternately clunkish. The characters were fascinating but could also turn quickly into cartoons. The plot and narrative in both were kinda sluggish. It was like a nature hike through an overgrown wood. Lots of leafy prose to appreciate, but moving forward was kinda a pain in the ass.
His debut novel The Twenty-Seventh City had more narrative thrust, but the plot was a bit labyrinthine. It moved, but you just seemed a bit dazed after. Talent was there. Excess of young potential and talent really, but unbridled, messy, unrestrained.
'Purity' seems to give us a faster-paced, more plot-driven family novel. So, some of the excesses of his last two novels seem to be trimmed (yes, I'm talking about ze sex, but we will get to that). It also is less of a puzzle. Even the structure was clean and clear. So, while I think this might be Franzen's most enjoyable novel to-date, I'd still rank 'The Corrections' as his best (despite its flaws). If that doesn't make sense (and It might just be me), I'm really sorry. Truly. I have a history of mixed signals. I think Pynchon's Mason and Dixon is his most enjoyable novel, even though I think Against the Day is a superior book. Anyway, I do digress.
Let's get back to the structure of this novel. Franzen gives hints at his plan with this novel with way he divides the novel. The novel is divided thus:
Section 1: Purity in Oakland; perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
Section 2: The Republic of Bad Taste; perspective = Andreas Wolf
Section 3: Too Much Information; perspective = Leila Helou
Section 4: Moonglow Dairy: perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
Section 5: [lelo9n8aOrd]: perspective = Tom Aberant
Section 6: The Killer; perspective = Andreas Wolf
Section 7: The Rain Comes; perspective = PIP, aka Purity Tyler
So, just in case the title doesn't give it away, this novel is PIP's. She is the actual beginning, middle and end of this story. But Andreas Wolf is the anti-hero, the counterpoint, the response to Pip's call. The ebb to her flow?
So here are my three main gripes about the book. The reason for the missing star.
FRANZEN'S LIBS
Some of my old gripes about Franzen still exist. Sometimes, I can't decide if he exists in an obnoxious liberal fairy tale, or is just really good writing about liberal fairy tales. If I was a betting man, I'd lay a Billion he gets a kick out of all his blatant self-parody. Franzen seems über self-aware and seems to enjoy using Pip's mom to poke a bit of fun at the extreme end of the cartoonish, obnoxious, west coast liberal... but at other times Franzen himself seems to fully embody and gloat in this same cartoon. It wasn't obnoxious enough to distract me for long from the novel, and look I'm a pretty liberal guy myself, but sometimes Franzen's approach to capitalism, feminism, privacy, animal rights and global warming seems a bit clumsy. Perhaps, it might just all be me.
FRANZEN + SEX
Also, I could say the same thing about Franzen and sex. To be fair, most writers can't write about sex. They either take themselves way too seriously or not seriously enough. Franzen seems a bit more comfortable writing about spanking the monkey (perhaps that is the danger of being a writer) than sex between man and woman (or woman and woman, or man and man). But, that said, his awkward sex scenes were mostly ALL supposed to be awkward. These aren't healthy adult couples manifesting their love or desire for another person through physical contact. These are issues of power, control, obsession, Oedipal longing, etc. So, like his writing about the liberal extremities, I can't quite decide if his writing about sex is perfectly awkward or just awkward. It is a bit like watching Andy Kaufman. You aren't sure when he is joking or if the joke is on you. He just doesn't see to have grown much past his Freedom days. Yes, you all know what I mean: "the hot, hungry microcosm of Patti's c#nt". See? I can't even write it or not write it without barfing and giggling at the same time.
FRANZEN & WOMEN
Sometimes when I read Franzen writing about women, or as a woman (read PIP), I'm reminded of that fantastic Jack Nicholson's quip from 'As Good As It Gets'. Except...AGAIN I'm not sure if Franzen is doing this on purpose. Perhaps, the whole reason I gave this book only four stars is the one star is all about my uncertainty. Is Franzen truly a dick or is he just playing with the idea of being a dick? I dunno. For sure he isn't folding to Jennifer Weiner's attack on his prickish prose.
So, I guess that is what I'm asking. Is Franzen's prose pose about women, sex, liberals a put on or is it just Franzen being Franzen? I'm not sure. And to be fair, I'm not sure I really care. In a lot of ways it is like Mailer being Mailer. Did I ever want Norman Mailer to start wearing cardigans and sticking his pinky out while drinking mixed drinks? Hell no. I liked Franzen's book. And while I've set out my three little gripes, they weren't THAT big. I don't want them to seem more than what they were. I'd probably find a couple reasons to bitch about Ecclesiastes too.
November 8, 2017
Big Johnny Franzen is not on top of his game here. Instead, his game is on top of him. This novel was built too high and extended in all directions, probably without planning permission, so maybe no surprise that the ceilings all sag and a lot of the windows are busted out. Leaks everywhere. I lost track of who was actually living in it, people traipsing in all hours of the day and night. Who’s that? Is it Tom’s girlfriend’s first husband’s second wife? Or Pip’s lover’s son’s friend’s father who is also, mysteriously, Tom’s girlfriend’s first husband? Diagrams would have been helpful, Big Johnny. A point to ponder for next time maybe.
UNSYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS
I hated the whole lot of them.
SMOTHERY MOTHERS
There are three dreadful maniac nightmare mothers here. No normal ones at all. What’s up with that?
UNTIL THE PIPS SQUEAK
Our protagonist, Pip is a droopy, boring 23 year old woman with $130,000 in student loans. How many times does this get mentioned? 130,000 times! Her name makes us think of the other famous Pip, in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Not just because of the name but because both Pips have mysterious unknown fathers who the Pips are seeking, and, readers suspect, when the truth is revealed it will probably involve shedloads of money and tears before bedtime.
PIP’S SEX LIFE
The novel is intimately concerned with Pip’s sex life. Overly intimately. She gets obsessed about one of her fellow lodgers, a married guy old enough to be her father. That doesn’t work out. She gets involved with a thing called the Sunlight Project and its “charismatic” (that word is used) leader Andreas Wolf, a man old enough to be her father. So naturally, yes, you guessed. Then she gets a job as an intern at an online newspaper and gets involved with the editor who is old enough….. it seems awfully mechanical. Pip sees older man in room. Pip makes beeline for him. Is this psychology in action? Pretty deep stuff.
TRULY MADLY DEEPLY AWFUL DIALOGUE
“Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to have a parent more like you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter like you, either”
…
“Pip, I know I’m old. Probably as old as your father. But I have a young heart – I don’t have much experience with real love. Probably not much more than you do. This is new and frightening for me, too.”
…
“My God, you’re beautiful”
“I think you mean I’m young.”
“No. The inside of you is even more beautiful than the outside.”
(It’s okay, it’s a figure of speech – he’s not a surgeon!)
RAMPANT LOOKSISM
You know how some tv networks won’t contemplate for one second putting a female presenter on their screens unless she is radiantly good-looking, dressed to the nines, made up by the world’s top make-up artist, and under the age of 34? Similar thing here. There are a fair number of young female characters in Purity and wouldn’t you know, every one is a knockout :
Annagret was a dark-eyed beauty and had a pleasing voice… A girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him
*
“How old is she?”
“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.”
“…they simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be bad inside…”
*
Phyllisha’s one of them girls that all she has to do is shake her goldy locks and all the men lose their mind.
*
Colleen had grown up on an organic farm in Vermont and was, it went without saying, very pretty
*
She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty, lovely in a way to be aspired to.
(So here we are told that all the interns at Sunlight Project were pretty, in an irritating kind of way.)
Moral of this story : if you’re average looking, you’re very likely not going to be appearing in Jonathan Franzen’s next novel. He has certain standards he likes to maintain. It’s a bit creepy if you ask me.
YOU HAVE BEEN FRANZENED
I’m sure this does make sense, but it’s the kind of sense I don’t really have the time to make:
Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point.
Now you have been Franzened!
You see what he wants to do – grab up big zeitgeisty themes – is the internet the new totalitarianism? – when is a cult not a cult? – when does feminism become a diagnosable mental condition? – are relations between the sexes in this day and age completely fucked or only mostly fucked? – is murder justified ever? – can you spend morally tainted money in an ethical way? – and he wants to smoosh all these things into his characters and situations and so that’s what he does. Franzen loves the zeitgeist, he smears big dollops of it all over himself when he wakes up every morning, he rolls around in pools of zeitgeist in the afternoon like some big woolly dog that wins literary prizes. But his characters are mostly wooden and the moment they take their foot off the gas they speak in pure soap; and the double McGuffin of this big fat novel – Pip’s search for her father and her rightful inheritance (a billion, like, dollars, literally) was so banal and so nineteenth century it made me want to put this book down and watch Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away! on the tv.
The Corrections – 5 stars
Freedom – 3 stars
Purity – 2 stars
UNSYMPATHETIC CHARACTERS
I hated the whole lot of them.
SMOTHERY MOTHERS
There are three dreadful maniac nightmare mothers here. No normal ones at all. What’s up with that?
UNTIL THE PIPS SQUEAK
Our protagonist, Pip is a droopy, boring 23 year old woman with $130,000 in student loans. How many times does this get mentioned? 130,000 times! Her name makes us think of the other famous Pip, in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Not just because of the name but because both Pips have mysterious unknown fathers who the Pips are seeking, and, readers suspect, when the truth is revealed it will probably involve shedloads of money and tears before bedtime.
PIP’S SEX LIFE
The novel is intimately concerned with Pip’s sex life. Overly intimately. She gets obsessed about one of her fellow lodgers, a married guy old enough to be her father. That doesn’t work out. She gets involved with a thing called the Sunlight Project and its “charismatic” (that word is used) leader Andreas Wolf, a man old enough to be her father. So naturally, yes, you guessed. Then she gets a job as an intern at an online newspaper and gets involved with the editor who is old enough….. it seems awfully mechanical. Pip sees older man in room. Pip makes beeline for him. Is this psychology in action? Pretty deep stuff.
TRULY MADLY DEEPLY AWFUL DIALOGUE
“Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to have a parent more like you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter like you, either”
…
“Pip, I know I’m old. Probably as old as your father. But I have a young heart – I don’t have much experience with real love. Probably not much more than you do. This is new and frightening for me, too.”
…
“My God, you’re beautiful”
“I think you mean I’m young.”
“No. The inside of you is even more beautiful than the outside.”
(It’s okay, it’s a figure of speech – he’s not a surgeon!)
RAMPANT LOOKSISM
You know how some tv networks won’t contemplate for one second putting a female presenter on their screens unless she is radiantly good-looking, dressed to the nines, made up by the world’s top make-up artist, and under the age of 34? Similar thing here. There are a fair number of young female characters in Purity and wouldn’t you know, every one is a knockout :
Annagret was a dark-eyed beauty and had a pleasing voice… A girl with perfect hair and skin and bone structure. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him
*
“How old is she?”
“Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.”
“…they simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be bad inside…”
*
Phyllisha’s one of them girls that all she has to do is shake her goldy locks and all the men lose their mind.
*
Colleen had grown up on an organic farm in Vermont and was, it went without saying, very pretty
*
She seemed pretty in a very particular way to Pip. Not irritating-pretty like the Sunlight Project interns; older-pretty, lovely in a way to be aspired to.
(So here we are told that all the interns at Sunlight Project were pretty, in an irritating kind of way.)
Moral of this story : if you’re average looking, you’re very likely not going to be appearing in Jonathan Franzen’s next novel. He has certain standards he likes to maintain. It’s a bit creepy if you ask me.
YOU HAVE BEEN FRANZENED
I’m sure this does make sense, but it’s the kind of sense I don’t really have the time to make:
Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point.
Now you have been Franzened!
You see what he wants to do – grab up big zeitgeisty themes – is the internet the new totalitarianism? – when is a cult not a cult? – when does feminism become a diagnosable mental condition? – are relations between the sexes in this day and age completely fucked or only mostly fucked? – is murder justified ever? – can you spend morally tainted money in an ethical way? – and he wants to smoosh all these things into his characters and situations and so that’s what he does. Franzen loves the zeitgeist, he smears big dollops of it all over himself when he wakes up every morning, he rolls around in pools of zeitgeist in the afternoon like some big woolly dog that wins literary prizes. But his characters are mostly wooden and the moment they take their foot off the gas they speak in pure soap; and the double McGuffin of this big fat novel – Pip’s search for her father and her rightful inheritance (a billion, like, dollars, literally) was so banal and so nineteenth century it made me want to put this book down and watch Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away! on the tv.
The Corrections – 5 stars
Freedom – 3 stars
Purity – 2 stars
August 17, 2015
“It sucks to be well-known,” says a character in the new novel by well-known author Jonathan Franzen. “Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person.”
It’s tempting to hear that — and mock that — as the author’s cri de coeur. Who else has ever worn the mantle of “The Great American Novelist” so uncomfortably, so unable to relish his fame or renounce it? Even as we’ve largely expelled literary writers from the pantheon of celebrity, Franzen, who never shot a rhino in Africa or even stabbed his wife at a party, remains stuck in the spotlight, wincing through those black-framed glasses.
But if there’s an autobiographical impulse behind his new novel, “Purity,” which will be released Sept. 1, it’s subsumed by the story’s globe-spanning scope. As he did in “The Corrections” (2001) and “Freedom” (2010), Franzen once again begins with a family, but his ravenous intellect strides the globe, drawing us through a collection of cleverly connected plots infused with. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
It’s tempting to hear that — and mock that — as the author’s cri de coeur. Who else has ever worn the mantle of “The Great American Novelist” so uncomfortably, so unable to relish his fame or renounce it? Even as we’ve largely expelled literary writers from the pantheon of celebrity, Franzen, who never shot a rhino in Africa or even stabbed his wife at a party, remains stuck in the spotlight, wincing through those black-framed glasses.
But if there’s an autobiographical impulse behind his new novel, “Purity,” which will be released Sept. 1, it’s subsumed by the story’s globe-spanning scope. As he did in “The Corrections” (2001) and “Freedom” (2010), Franzen once again begins with a family, but his ravenous intellect strides the globe, drawing us through a collection of cleverly connected plots infused with. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
September 23, 2015
Franzen in Purgatory?
Writing a novel is an intimate act. And a novel about intimate acts is even more revealing. After listening, twice, to Purity read on audio by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff, I immediately listened to several of the author interviews Franzen gave in the push phase of his novel promotion. I came away thinking Franzen is in a world of hurt.
The voices in this book all seem to be coming from inside the mind of one man. I never assume the writer has himself under the microscope, but in this case I have drawn the conclusion that Franzen doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know: how his self-styled isolation and arrogance about his experience of “the battle between the sexes” or “what other people do” has left him bereft of folks who could tell him what he needs to hear. His anger and confusion is slowly draining his battery. Something is rotten indeed in Franzen’s world.
Franzen is completely intentional and self-aware about his “stale, obese, exhausting…bloated and immensely disagreeable” work. “More matter, with less art.” (Hamlet, Act II.ii) The question remains why he wrote this book and not another.
Let’s agree on two things at least. Franzen has talent. Franzen has been exceedingly popular. He was popular because in the past he used a sharpish humor to define recognizable family dilemmas. His books were long but that was a particularity, not a peculiarity.
In Purity there are moments of giggle-bit humor: "His stomach looked like that of an adult sea-turtle" and the journalistic coup describing whole nuclear warhead fiasco. But what is missing from this novel is kindness. Did anyone else see a moment of inexplicable, un-self-interested, or unexpected generosity? Perhaps Tom re-burying the dead body? Even that gruesome helpfulness was predicated on gaining Wulf’s intimacy.
Descriptions of marital disharmony can only be funny when one knows that the two love one another. Franzen tells us Tom and Anabel do, but we don’t actually see any of that until arguably much later, when it surfaces that neither of them tries to expose the other. Not quite love then, since it is a negative, rather than positive, expression. We all know how intimacy can turn toxic, but what I didn’t feel is any relief from it, which I guess is Franzen’s point. None of us is pure. No one acknowledges the full complement of one’s own deceptions.
The good news is that this book does not define or reflect the world. I am hardly a poster child for unreserved glee, but I recognize that there are only two ways out of a "terminally fucked-up world:" do everything you can to improve its outlook or get out of the way. "To be, or not to be." (…III.i) Difficult choice: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…but that the dread of something after death…makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." (…III.i)
In an interview with NPR Radio Host Terry Gross and in several other interviews, Franzen admits to feeling he may have missed out on a key human adventure: having children. When he was advised against it by an editor, he threw away the idea of adopting some Iraqi orphans. He should have gotten different opinions if he cared what others thought. People will talk you out of the best things you will do in life. I’m one who thinks it may have made him a better person, a more loving, loved, and forgiving man. And a better author, not a worse one.
For one, Franzen may have learned something about a key societal malfunction facing America today: race relations, including social profiling, and discrimination. In an interview included at the end of the unabridged Macmillan Audio file, Franzen explains he couldn’t write about race because he has no intimate knowledge of race relations, but "I have plenty of experience with the battle between the sexes." Yes, it appears to be so. Unsurprising, given (among other things) his constant insistence on beauty in lieu of more lasting, purposeful, and buildable human attributes including generosity and kindness. At a time when people around the world are celebrating the loosening bonds of constraint around “differentness,” here is a throwback novel from a rich old white male, anguished for having missed the point. Purgatory, indeed.
One only has one go at life, unless one believes in reincarnation. And there may well be "more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (… I.5) So, lose the leafy splendor of your golden crown, your self-pity, anxiety, "great expectations," and get on with life, Franzen. Grab it with both hands. Time is short.
Franzen returns again and again to his bitterness about the failure he sees in the promise of an Obama presidency. "The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll capture the conscience of the king." (…III.i.) How quickly Franzen became disillusioned.
"[wo]Man, thy name is frailty." (…I.ii) Hath thou no understanding of the opposition our king hath faced? Do not thou think our king would have moved with sure swift sword on those who abuse their privilege, could he have done so? And what of his diplomacy of these last years, after your accusation? Do you not think he hath fulfilled some small part of his promise? Forgive not, and neither shall thee be forgiven.
This book is a tragedy.
Two stars for Franzen finishing it, despite his obvious agony in writing it.
”After all, as Aquinas wrote, the least degree of pain in Purgatory ‘surpasses the greatest pain that one can endure in this world.’”
----Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in Purgatory
Writing a novel is an intimate act. And a novel about intimate acts is even more revealing. After listening, twice, to Purity read on audio by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff, I immediately listened to several of the author interviews Franzen gave in the push phase of his novel promotion. I came away thinking Franzen is in a world of hurt.
The voices in this book all seem to be coming from inside the mind of one man. I never assume the writer has himself under the microscope, but in this case I have drawn the conclusion that Franzen doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know: how his self-styled isolation and arrogance about his experience of “the battle between the sexes” or “what other people do” has left him bereft of folks who could tell him what he needs to hear. His anger and confusion is slowly draining his battery. Something is rotten indeed in Franzen’s world.
Franzen is completely intentional and self-aware about his “stale, obese, exhausting…bloated and immensely disagreeable” work. “More matter, with less art.” (Hamlet, Act II.ii) The question remains why he wrote this book and not another.
Let’s agree on two things at least. Franzen has talent. Franzen has been exceedingly popular. He was popular because in the past he used a sharpish humor to define recognizable family dilemmas. His books were long but that was a particularity, not a peculiarity.
In Purity there are moments of giggle-bit humor: "His stomach looked like that of an adult sea-turtle" and the journalistic coup describing whole nuclear warhead fiasco. But what is missing from this novel is kindness. Did anyone else see a moment of inexplicable, un-self-interested, or unexpected generosity? Perhaps Tom re-burying the dead body? Even that gruesome helpfulness was predicated on gaining Wulf’s intimacy.
Descriptions of marital disharmony can only be funny when one knows that the two love one another. Franzen tells us Tom and Anabel do, but we don’t actually see any of that until arguably much later, when it surfaces that neither of them tries to expose the other. Not quite love then, since it is a negative, rather than positive, expression. We all know how intimacy can turn toxic, but what I didn’t feel is any relief from it, which I guess is Franzen’s point. None of us is pure. No one acknowledges the full complement of one’s own deceptions.
The good news is that this book does not define or reflect the world. I am hardly a poster child for unreserved glee, but I recognize that there are only two ways out of a "terminally fucked-up world:" do everything you can to improve its outlook or get out of the way. "To be, or not to be." (…III.i) Difficult choice: "For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…but that the dread of something after death…makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." (…III.i)
In an interview with NPR Radio Host Terry Gross and in several other interviews, Franzen admits to feeling he may have missed out on a key human adventure: having children. When he was advised against it by an editor, he threw away the idea of adopting some Iraqi orphans. He should have gotten different opinions if he cared what others thought. People will talk you out of the best things you will do in life. I’m one who thinks it may have made him a better person, a more loving, loved, and forgiving man. And a better author, not a worse one.
For one, Franzen may have learned something about a key societal malfunction facing America today: race relations, including social profiling, and discrimination. In an interview included at the end of the unabridged Macmillan Audio file, Franzen explains he couldn’t write about race because he has no intimate knowledge of race relations, but "I have plenty of experience with the battle between the sexes." Yes, it appears to be so. Unsurprising, given (among other things) his constant insistence on beauty in lieu of more lasting, purposeful, and buildable human attributes including generosity and kindness. At a time when people around the world are celebrating the loosening bonds of constraint around “differentness,” here is a throwback novel from a rich old white male, anguished for having missed the point. Purgatory, indeed.
One only has one go at life, unless one believes in reincarnation. And there may well be "more things in heaven and earth…than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (… I.5) So, lose the leafy splendor of your golden crown, your self-pity, anxiety, "great expectations," and get on with life, Franzen. Grab it with both hands. Time is short.
Franzen returns again and again to his bitterness about the failure he sees in the promise of an Obama presidency. "The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll capture the conscience of the king." (…III.i.) How quickly Franzen became disillusioned.
"[
This book is a tragedy.
Two stars for Franzen finishing it, despite his obvious agony in writing it.
December 4, 2015
100 pages to go (and I will finish) and reading a review in the LA Book Review despite trying to avoid all press, sums up my experience.
What darkens Purity and weakens its realist musculature is Franzen’s atavistic treatment of male and female character. In Purity’s calculus, men are predators, women prey, and rape an inevitable aspect of being. We are asked to regard the male characters’ sexual urges — including rape, incest, pedophilia, the consumption of brutal pornography, and acts of murder — as biological prerogatives unjustly targeted by 20th-century feminism. Franzen has run afoul of feminism in his capacity as a public intellectual, and there is a separate, important argument to be made about the brashly trumpeted impieties of a privileged author. There is also much to be said about Franzen’s novel as an artifact of our historical moment, when sexual violence is a global and national epidemic. But let us acknowledge first that Purity’s sexual attitudes cripple its narrative artistry. The novel’s pervasive antifeminism interferes with both the wide-angle lens and the pointillist detail necessary to Franzen’s formal-historical ambitions. Were male sexual violence and female self-abnegation confined to specific characters in this polyvocal work, they could invite alternate frames of reference for judging key events and conflicts. But the unvarying primacy of male desire deadens the very pulse of story, unkind to our curiosity about the circumstances of Pip’s birth, the impact of Andreas Wolf’s power-toppling leaks, the future of Tom and Leila’s partnership.
Like Tom, Purity’s other male characters resent feminism’s artificial, misguided interventions into their private “motives.” Forced to reconstitute their natural desires as cultural crimes, Franzen’s multigenerational, polyglot men find solidarity in a fantasy voiced by Andreas Wolf: “What if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?” Depravity with impunity: in reducing men to this dull fantasy and women to its antagonists, Franzen cheapens the character-rich achievements of the authors — not only Dickens, but also Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, O’Connor — he claims to emulate.
In a 2010 New York Times review of Freedom, Sam Tenenhaus asked rhetorically, “Assaultive sex reverberates through Freedom, and why not?” Why not, indeed? Not because misogyny and good writing are, or should be, mutually exclusive. But because in Franzen’s hands, complicated sex lacks Nabokov’s poetry, Coetzee’s philosophy, Naipaul’s somberness, and Roth’s exuberance. Because episode after episode of rape limits Purity’s literary scope, reducing characters to pseudo-primitive desires rather than illustrating their full humanity. Because a novelist who criticizes experimental literature’s inadequate attention to character has brought a disheartening sameness to Purity’s ostensibly diverse men and women. And finally, because Purity’s antifeminism is fatal to the arc of growth that defines the bildungsroman. At her journey’s outset, Pip “fantasized about submitting and obeying,” telling Andreas Wolf, “I think I may have a slave personality” and imploring him, “Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism.” At the novel’s end, Pip still “wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all.” So dangerous is the prospect of female autonomy that Purity denies its protagonist the independence that Dickens bequeathed to his Pip.
Over the week i have read it, I have felt angry and most of all kind of dirty, but I read it -- which I need to think about, obviously.
What darkens Purity and weakens its realist musculature is Franzen’s atavistic treatment of male and female character. In Purity’s calculus, men are predators, women prey, and rape an inevitable aspect of being. We are asked to regard the male characters’ sexual urges — including rape, incest, pedophilia, the consumption of brutal pornography, and acts of murder — as biological prerogatives unjustly targeted by 20th-century feminism. Franzen has run afoul of feminism in his capacity as a public intellectual, and there is a separate, important argument to be made about the brashly trumpeted impieties of a privileged author. There is also much to be said about Franzen’s novel as an artifact of our historical moment, when sexual violence is a global and national epidemic. But let us acknowledge first that Purity’s sexual attitudes cripple its narrative artistry. The novel’s pervasive antifeminism interferes with both the wide-angle lens and the pointillist detail necessary to Franzen’s formal-historical ambitions. Were male sexual violence and female self-abnegation confined to specific characters in this polyvocal work, they could invite alternate frames of reference for judging key events and conflicts. But the unvarying primacy of male desire deadens the very pulse of story, unkind to our curiosity about the circumstances of Pip’s birth, the impact of Andreas Wolf’s power-toppling leaks, the future of Tom and Leila’s partnership.
Like Tom, Purity’s other male characters resent feminism’s artificial, misguided interventions into their private “motives.” Forced to reconstitute their natural desires as cultural crimes, Franzen’s multigenerational, polyglot men find solidarity in a fantasy voiced by Andreas Wolf: “What if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?” Depravity with impunity: in reducing men to this dull fantasy and women to its antagonists, Franzen cheapens the character-rich achievements of the authors — not only Dickens, but also Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, O’Connor — he claims to emulate.
In a 2010 New York Times review of Freedom, Sam Tenenhaus asked rhetorically, “Assaultive sex reverberates through Freedom, and why not?” Why not, indeed? Not because misogyny and good writing are, or should be, mutually exclusive. But because in Franzen’s hands, complicated sex lacks Nabokov’s poetry, Coetzee’s philosophy, Naipaul’s somberness, and Roth’s exuberance. Because episode after episode of rape limits Purity’s literary scope, reducing characters to pseudo-primitive desires rather than illustrating their full humanity. Because a novelist who criticizes experimental literature’s inadequate attention to character has brought a disheartening sameness to Purity’s ostensibly diverse men and women. And finally, because Purity’s antifeminism is fatal to the arc of growth that defines the bildungsroman. At her journey’s outset, Pip “fantasized about submitting and obeying,” telling Andreas Wolf, “I think I may have a slave personality” and imploring him, “Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism.” At the novel’s end, Pip still “wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all.” So dangerous is the prospect of female autonomy that Purity denies its protagonist the independence that Dickens bequeathed to his Pip.
Over the week i have read it, I have felt angry and most of all kind of dirty, but I read it -- which I need to think about, obviously.
March 6, 2022
Just a bunch of mentally unstable characters who destroy everyone around them. Their problems and moral dilemmas may seem unreasonable, but the story is very well written so it's quite interesting to read this psychological mess.
September 10, 2015
Apparently, I looked really intense while reading this, which seems appropriate for one of Franzen’s Big Serious Books, but this one felt lighter than The Corrections and Freedom, and funnier somehow, even though it has all the things I expect from Franzen: the calling out of our emptiness, technology and what it’s done to us, the intense love-hate-needy relationship thing, the girlfriends and wives and mothers are all evil thing, the all fathers are selfish assholes thing, and so on. What I’ve always enjoyed about Franzen novels is that all the characters are despicable and unappealing, and their actions are deliciously destructive, and he delivers in that respect with Purity, even throwing in a psychopath with an Oedipus complex, which is always fun.
Purity started out shakily. It was entertaining but a little awkward, then by chapter two it hit its stride and I was engrossed and enjoying it quite a lot. In fact, for most of the middle portion, this was a 4.5 with the potential to tip in either direction. Then, I was asked to partake in some serious suspension of belief during the second Andreas chapter and for a moment it became a Hollywood script, which I’m sure was intentional mockery (well, I hope), but it felt a little off towards the climax.
It’s a little noir, a little thriller, a little tragicomedy, a lot social satire and critique (of course), wonderfully clever and highly engaging overall.
Purity started out shakily. It was entertaining but a little awkward, then by chapter two it hit its stride and I was engrossed and enjoying it quite a lot. In fact, for most of the middle portion, this was a 4.5 with the potential to tip in either direction. Then, I was asked to partake in some serious suspension of belief during the second Andreas chapter and for a moment it became a Hollywood script, which I’m sure was intentional mockery (well, I hope), but it felt a little off towards the climax.
It’s a little noir, a little thriller, a little tragicomedy, a lot social satire and critique (of course), wonderfully clever and highly engaging overall.
September 20, 2015
Grumpy Cat made an appearance at BEA two years ago and it was the first my boss – a cranky, fifty-something man with a warped sense of humor – had heard of the internet sensation. He came back from New York telling us how long the lines were for a goddamn cat and, since then, Grumpy Cat has been a particular favorite around the office. Tom even used the feline as his photo for the online staff directory. He is totally one with Grumpy Cat.
Franzen was the big draw at BEA this year—there to promote this little darling. When I got the announcement from PW, I ran around to everyone in my office telling them, “Hey! Tom can meet the human Grumpy Cat this year!” I know I’m not the only one to make that joke, but all I got from my coworkers were blank stares of incomprehension.
I texted my husband: No one in this office gets my Jonathan Franzen jokes.
He texted back: I bet Jonathan Franzen would write an angry essay about that.
Guys, this is why I married him. He gets my Jonathan Franzen jokes before I even tell him my Jonathan Franzen jokes. That’s love, friends.
So, anyway, we all know that Jonathan Franzen is a human Grumpy Cat. Which made it all the more odd to me that he’d choose to write a book whose initial thrust seemed to be the quarterlife crisis of a female Millennial. Who could possibly be less qualified to write about the perils of being a young twentysomething woman in the early twenty-first century than JONATHAN FUCKING FRANZEN?
To be clear, it becomes about more than that. And to be clearer, I actually quite like Jonathan Franzen. I’ve changed and grown quite a bit since I read The Corrections when I was 23, but I liked it and I remember it fondly (I was 23 so maybe I’d hate it if I read it now, who knows?) Freedom was okay; I enjoyed the writing more than the story or the characters. There are some moments in Purity where I very much enjoyed the prose – Franzen’s a great writer, for sure, even if he is prone to some pretentious fucking word choices. “Severally pierced ears”? Dude, come on.
But holy bananas, the story and the characters were brutal. Freudian nightmares, all of them.
It’s broken up into several chunks that focus on different characters, but things start with Pip, the Millennial girl whose clingy, and possibly crazy, mother has kept her in the dark about basic biographical information related to her parents. After leaving a dead-end, vaguely customer serviceish job, Pip gets an internship with the Sunlight Project, a Wikileaksish type organization that’s based in Bolivia but run by an East German dude who is quite possibly the worst book character in the history of the written word.
Roxane Gay puts it best, as only Roxane Gay can: “Purity is, if nothing else, frantically reaching for the zeitgeist.”
I don’t know, perhaps this is supposed to be a commentary on the complaint that White Men Have Problems, Too? I mean, I know Franzen gets a lot of shit for being a white man writing books about white men for other white men to read. There are many instances of the characters saying and doing things that Franzen’s been accused of. So maybe he is trying to thumb his nose at people who give him that shit? But it’s not clear to me in what direction he’s thumbing and I’m not interested enough to do some research on the topic and find out; if a book’s goal is not at least partially obvious, I tend to believe the book is not particularly successful.
This had the potential to thoughtfully explore all kinds of facets related to being disengaged and technology and morality and notoriety. The bones are there, and I do like the basic structure. But the final result ended up feeling bloated and indulgent, completely lacking in focus. In theory, this should be a more plot-driven book, but Franzen’s still writing it so there’s a lot of musing and rambling about things that seem so far-flung it’s hard to tell how those oranges are even remotely related to the hamburgers (fuck apples, he’s gone beyond the produce aisle here) at the center of the plot.
He bounces around in time, to some extent and to occasionally great effect. After Pip is lured to Bolivia, we learn the background of the German man in charge of the Sunlight Project. And then we jump forward to meet other people whose lives Pip falls into, and backwards once again to learn their histories. It was a lot, and quite a bit of it dragged. If the number of words used to do all this had been pared down considerably—and if he’d toned down the desire to be zeitgeisty, the overwhelming Freudianism, and the intense disdain for feminism—then Franzen might have delivered one heck of a novel.
Franzen was the big draw at BEA this year—there to promote this little darling. When I got the announcement from PW, I ran around to everyone in my office telling them, “Hey! Tom can meet the human Grumpy Cat this year!” I know I’m not the only one to make that joke, but all I got from my coworkers were blank stares of incomprehension.
I texted my husband: No one in this office gets my Jonathan Franzen jokes.
He texted back: I bet Jonathan Franzen would write an angry essay about that.
Guys, this is why I married him. He gets my Jonathan Franzen jokes before I even tell him my Jonathan Franzen jokes. That’s love, friends.
So, anyway, we all know that Jonathan Franzen is a human Grumpy Cat. Which made it all the more odd to me that he’d choose to write a book whose initial thrust seemed to be the quarterlife crisis of a female Millennial. Who could possibly be less qualified to write about the perils of being a young twentysomething woman in the early twenty-first century than JONATHAN FUCKING FRANZEN?
To be clear, it becomes about more than that. And to be clearer, I actually quite like Jonathan Franzen. I’ve changed and grown quite a bit since I read The Corrections when I was 23, but I liked it and I remember it fondly (I was 23 so maybe I’d hate it if I read it now, who knows?) Freedom was okay; I enjoyed the writing more than the story or the characters. There are some moments in Purity where I very much enjoyed the prose – Franzen’s a great writer, for sure, even if he is prone to some pretentious fucking word choices. “Severally pierced ears”? Dude, come on.
But holy bananas, the story and the characters were brutal. Freudian nightmares, all of them.
It’s broken up into several chunks that focus on different characters, but things start with Pip, the Millennial girl whose clingy, and possibly crazy, mother has kept her in the dark about basic biographical information related to her parents. After leaving a dead-end, vaguely customer serviceish job, Pip gets an internship with the Sunlight Project, a Wikileaksish type organization that’s based in Bolivia but run by an East German dude who is quite possibly the worst book character in the history of the written word.
Roxane Gay puts it best, as only Roxane Gay can: “Purity is, if nothing else, frantically reaching for the zeitgeist.”
I don’t know, perhaps this is supposed to be a commentary on the complaint that White Men Have Problems, Too? I mean, I know Franzen gets a lot of shit for being a white man writing books about white men for other white men to read. There are many instances of the characters saying and doing things that Franzen’s been accused of. So maybe he is trying to thumb his nose at people who give him that shit? But it’s not clear to me in what direction he’s thumbing and I’m not interested enough to do some research on the topic and find out; if a book’s goal is not at least partially obvious, I tend to believe the book is not particularly successful.
This had the potential to thoughtfully explore all kinds of facets related to being disengaged and technology and morality and notoriety. The bones are there, and I do like the basic structure. But the final result ended up feeling bloated and indulgent, completely lacking in focus. In theory, this should be a more plot-driven book, but Franzen’s still writing it so there’s a lot of musing and rambling about things that seem so far-flung it’s hard to tell how those oranges are even remotely related to the hamburgers (fuck apples, he’s gone beyond the produce aisle here) at the center of the plot.
He bounces around in time, to some extent and to occasionally great effect. After Pip is lured to Bolivia, we learn the background of the German man in charge of the Sunlight Project. And then we jump forward to meet other people whose lives Pip falls into, and backwards once again to learn their histories. It was a lot, and quite a bit of it dragged. If the number of words used to do all this had been pared down considerably—and if he’d toned down the desire to be zeitgeisty, the overwhelming Freudianism, and the intense disdain for feminism—then Franzen might have delivered one heck of a novel.
October 2, 2015
After the critical success of Franzen's last two novels – both of which I really enjoyed – the release of his first book in five years was always going to be a big deal. I hadn’t read any in-depth reviews prior to launching into it myself (I try to avoid this at all costs) but I had picked up the feeling that though some people really enjoyed it most reviewers pretty much loathed it. Interesting...
The criticism this book received put me in mind of the reaction to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, also released after two highly successful novels. It got panned in every review I read. In fact Wolfe’s most recent novel, Back to Blood, received even more vitriolic criticism. I found the former to be droll and interesting and the latter to be hilariously entertaining. So I was undaunted and grabbed an audio copy of Purity as soon as I could and settled in for the ride.
It’s a big story, but the main thread tracks a young woman, Purity Tyler, in her quest to find a father her mother steadfastly refuses to identify to her. The rationale for the search seems to be mainly driven by her desire to find someone to pay off her college fees and credit card debt, rather than a desperate desire to meet a lost parent. The tale jumps forward and back in time and is told through the eyes of four major protagonists: Purity, her mother, her father and a German hacker/whistleblower named Andreas. Its settings flow from the mountains of California to South America and to pre-unification Berlin.
The big aspects of this book are pretty satisfactory. All of the characters we get to know are neurotic (not unusual for Franzen) but Andreas seems to have slipped over the edge into outright madness. They are all complex, interesting and intelligent and have a worthwhile story of their own to tell. In truth, everyone hurts everyone else here, but it is fun to witness the carnage. I found the plot to be satisfying: intricate enough to grab me but not so confusing that I lost its thread.
But it was the other things, the little things that grabbed me most. The conversations kept throwing up insights and thoughts that stopped me in my tracks – ‘wow’ moments where I had to pause to contemplate the sheer truth of the words. And this is where the quality of the writing really shone through for me. Franzen is a gifted storyteller, but he’s in a class of his own when it comes to dialogue. And the settings were evocatively described - brilliantly so. For me this particularly applied Berlin, a city I happened to be visiting whilst working my way through this book. I’ve read since that the author spent a year studying in Berlin before the wall came down, which explains how he was able to paint such a vivid picture.
It’s not a perfect book: it’s probably a little too long – the last section seemed to drag on particularly – and, in truth, the whole thing does feel a little unbelievable. But, if you’re in the mood for a clever novel that’ll get you thinking then look no further.
The criticism this book received put me in mind of the reaction to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, also released after two highly successful novels. It got panned in every review I read. In fact Wolfe’s most recent novel, Back to Blood, received even more vitriolic criticism. I found the former to be droll and interesting and the latter to be hilariously entertaining. So I was undaunted and grabbed an audio copy of Purity as soon as I could and settled in for the ride.
It’s a big story, but the main thread tracks a young woman, Purity Tyler, in her quest to find a father her mother steadfastly refuses to identify to her. The rationale for the search seems to be mainly driven by her desire to find someone to pay off her college fees and credit card debt, rather than a desperate desire to meet a lost parent. The tale jumps forward and back in time and is told through the eyes of four major protagonists: Purity, her mother, her father and a German hacker/whistleblower named Andreas. Its settings flow from the mountains of California to South America and to pre-unification Berlin.
The big aspects of this book are pretty satisfactory. All of the characters we get to know are neurotic (not unusual for Franzen) but Andreas seems to have slipped over the edge into outright madness. They are all complex, interesting and intelligent and have a worthwhile story of their own to tell. In truth, everyone hurts everyone else here, but it is fun to witness the carnage. I found the plot to be satisfying: intricate enough to grab me but not so confusing that I lost its thread.
But it was the other things, the little things that grabbed me most. The conversations kept throwing up insights and thoughts that stopped me in my tracks – ‘wow’ moments where I had to pause to contemplate the sheer truth of the words. And this is where the quality of the writing really shone through for me. Franzen is a gifted storyteller, but he’s in a class of his own when it comes to dialogue. And the settings were evocatively described - brilliantly so. For me this particularly applied Berlin, a city I happened to be visiting whilst working my way through this book. I’ve read since that the author spent a year studying in Berlin before the wall came down, which explains how he was able to paint such a vivid picture.
It’s not a perfect book: it’s probably a little too long – the last section seemed to drag on particularly – and, in truth, the whole thing does feel a little unbelievable. But, if you’re in the mood for a clever novel that’ll get you thinking then look no further.
September 14, 2015
Sadly this novel and its full-chestedly tepid prose fucking sucks.
October 28, 2015
4.5 stars
So much densely packed Franzen-ness to savor here, I don't even know where to begin. I'd have to say Purity, Jonathan Franzen's eagerly-awaited fifth novel (in a roughly 25-year writing career) doesn't disappoint his fans (or certainly not this one), but that is not to say it's a smooth ride navigating this monster. There were several times I found myself fumbling through this, wondering when the heck clarity would ensue. It doesn't help matters that in typical Franzen-fashion, a Pulp Fiction-y non-linearity, combined with his typical run-on sentences demand a patience that some readers might not feel is earned.
This is not his most enjoyable novel, and probably not one a Franzen neophyte should cut her teeth on, but it is easily his most well-rounded endeavor, a story with real-world heft and significance. As with every novel of his, there's a dizzying array of characters on display here; the Fibonacci sequence starts at the center (if not the with the main character, with at least the titular fuzzy Mona Lisa-ed cover girl Purity "Pip" Tyler, a Northern California college graduate with $130K in college tuition debt and a job as a glorified telemarketer providing no opportunity to pay the debt down. From there the story wafts and spirals to a Julian Assange-esque Wiki-Leaks-like whistleblowing organization founder from East Germany (based in Bolivia) named Andreas Wolf, to a pair of journalists trying to maintain investigative integrity in the Internet age named Tom Aberant and Leila Halou, from there to a billionaire head of a food processing company and the daughter heiress refusing to take so much as even a dime of the family's money. It eventually becomes clear that each of these characters have an inexorable, yet totally unpredictable impact upon each other.
As random and divergent as the plot's direction seemed headed at times,, it never strayed too far from Franzen's bailiwick and specialty: the dysfunctional relationship.. I know of.no other author who can boil down to its essence a doomed pairing, and make it so funny, relatable, and filled with pathos. Franzen has been this deft with all. the troubled relationships in all the novels I've read of his thus far, but none of them more poignantly, corrosively examined than those in Purity.
I can totally understand how some would have an opposite viewpoint than I do. Franzen's style isn't the most accessible. and it's frustrating grappling with his occasionally oblique narrative style. But I'm happy to report that this, despite a few obligatory warts one could reasonably expect to find in a book this large, is quite a marvel.
So much densely packed Franzen-ness to savor here, I don't even know where to begin. I'd have to say Purity, Jonathan Franzen's eagerly-awaited fifth novel (in a roughly 25-year writing career) doesn't disappoint his fans (or certainly not this one), but that is not to say it's a smooth ride navigating this monster. There were several times I found myself fumbling through this, wondering when the heck clarity would ensue. It doesn't help matters that in typical Franzen-fashion, a Pulp Fiction-y non-linearity, combined with his typical run-on sentences demand a patience that some readers might not feel is earned.
This is not his most enjoyable novel, and probably not one a Franzen neophyte should cut her teeth on, but it is easily his most well-rounded endeavor, a story with real-world heft and significance. As with every novel of his, there's a dizzying array of characters on display here; the Fibonacci sequence starts at the center (if not the with the main character, with at least the titular fuzzy Mona Lisa-ed cover girl Purity "Pip" Tyler, a Northern California college graduate with $130K in college tuition debt and a job as a glorified telemarketer providing no opportunity to pay the debt down. From there the story wafts and spirals to a Julian Assange-esque Wiki-Leaks-like whistleblowing organization founder from East Germany (based in Bolivia) named Andreas Wolf, to a pair of journalists trying to maintain investigative integrity in the Internet age named Tom Aberant and Leila Halou, from there to a billionaire head of a food processing company and the daughter heiress refusing to take so much as even a dime of the family's money. It eventually becomes clear that each of these characters have an inexorable, yet totally unpredictable impact upon each other.
As random and divergent as the plot's direction seemed headed at times,, it never strayed too far from Franzen's bailiwick and specialty: the dysfunctional relationship.. I know of.no other author who can boil down to its essence a doomed pairing, and make it so funny, relatable, and filled with pathos. Franzen has been this deft with all. the troubled relationships in all the novels I've read of his thus far, but none of them more poignantly, corrosively examined than those in Purity.
I can totally understand how some would have an opposite viewpoint than I do. Franzen's style isn't the most accessible. and it's frustrating grappling with his occasionally oblique narrative style. But I'm happy to report that this, despite a few obligatory warts one could reasonably expect to find in a book this large, is quite a marvel.
September 29, 2015
Based on the cover image and the initial reviews I skimmed, I thought the character Purity, or Pip, was the central figure, but it's not at all predominately about a young woman with money problems living in an Oakland squat and spending a lot of time online. The title's "broad irony" is, by the end, sort of delicious. The whole J. Franz atmosphere of ickiness is an acquired taste in general -- in this it seems amplified/ickier -- but I found myself savoring the flavor after about 300 of its 563 pages. Best example: it's suggested that "Purity" was conceived after her father buggered her mother after they'd divorced -- importantly, father buggered mother thrice and after each completion mother visited the bathroom. This suggests that mother extracted goo from pooper and properly inserted it in baby maker -- an audacious suggestion, akin to the talking poo in The Corrections. It's important that father buggered mother thrice because it reflects the extent to which the author deploys backstory -- he doesn't just drop a few paragraphs or a scene or a chapter or 40 pages before resurfacing in the present. He drops 150 pages of a character's history, a novella's worth of depth -- he develops it, has patience with it, and pushes it to where it syncs with the rest of the story in a satisfying way. There's a fundamental confidence/lack of timidness that I respect. (It's laughable to critique this as the author's "contempt for readers," per the NPR review, or, better yet, "self-indulgent nonsense." Dark-casted and consistently intelligent thoroughness isn't contempt for a reader.) Time seems to pass as sections read days ago take on a temporal sheen. Memory comes into play and we're grateful for reminders of pages read more than a week ago. But all in all the author hauls off on backstory in a way that works with the story as a whole. The bits upfront about Purity and the guy she meets at Peet's, the ramshackle squat circa the Occupy era in Oakland really didn't do it for me -- but it served as a low-level entry for the rest to raise itself up. And of course it did because the author has complete authority -- the arc is going to go upward throughout as the character and thematic depth deepen. Again, it's not a story about a young woman in Oakland -- more so it follows two smart ambitious talented guys, one in Philadelphia at Penn, the other in East Germany around the time the Wall fell. The expository sections comparing communist totalitarianism and contemporary internet activities definitely knocked this one up a star for me. Throughout, there are slant autobiographical suggestions or commentary on the state of Franzen that I appreciated (beyond the bits about the famous writer). There's a review on here saying there's a possible parallel between JF and DFW and Tom Aberrant and Andreas Wolf -- Tom with his marriage troubles, writerly ambitions, and undergrad years in the Philly area echo Franzen's experience, and Wolf with his mommy issues and suicide echo DFW -- but I'm not sure about this since the bit from Tom's perspective seemed written at first in almost a cheap, adverb-replete DFW imitation before it slipped back into something closer to the established narrative voice. Interesting parallels to think about at least. The relationship stuff in general was always icky and combative, hostile, overrational, bitter, wounded -- and it's clear that the author has been through the shit. The overall gist is an ickiness to everything, an atmosphere of ugh that at the end is lifted a little by new love and a silly dog and some good rallies on the tennis court at dusk. But generally this isn't a novel that weaves with the fabric of actual reality -- it's structured like a comedy (protagonist starts off low but rises up by the end through a series of misadventures) but without so much as a single genuine LOL. There's insufficient light and all love is tainted by the inevitability of irrationality, selfishness, obstinacy. There's also the Franzen Formula, which is really the DeLillo formula but which Franzen makes more obvious -- the thing about characters' personal struggles extrapolated as cultural or societal struggles. Reminded me of Eggers's recent The Circle, which was easier reading, more enjoyable but also not as thorough and no one would ever accuse Franzen of a YA vibe. I think what maybe holds Franzen back a bit is the sense that he's in too much control, lacks a hole in the head to let the light in, distrusts intuition and the natural looseness of life -- there's no real serious spiritual side to his stuff, usually the mark of the highest order of writers. But I admire the structure, the intelligence, the immersion in an atmosphere I don't want to live in forever, the character depth, the attempt to tie everything together and wrap it all up -- by the end I felt like a novel I distrusted at first and thought pretty meh had totally redeemed itself. Worth it if you stick with it, with good characters who achieve 3D animation, some active semi-riveting dramatic scenes, enough interesting exposition especially about the Internet, a Phi Beta Kappa-worthy novel on transparency and the inability to achieve any sort of purity. It's the work of a skillful, often insightful, ambitious writer concerned with getting good grades -- no real chance therefore of it being a so-called failure. I think I'll read his first two novels now while my eyes are still blinded by the darkness up his ass (edit: started his first novel and put it down after a few pages -- not right for now, maybe later).
May 14, 2022
Jonathan Franzen is big on detailed explaining. He explains in detail what his characters are feeling. And he explains what these feelings mean and how they shift the constellations of the inner life of his characters. If he wasn't so big on explaining this would be a 450 page novel instead of a 650 page novel. Arguably it'd also be a more accomplished novel.
Empathy is probably the most important quality a novel has to create if it's going to hook you. This is more of a challenge if the characters are deeply unlikeable which is initially case with Purity. Secrets. Andreas has an overpowering mother and an unknown father. He also has an explosive secret; Pip also has an overpowering mother and an unknown father and she is a person from whom secrets are kept. Purity is a novel about the power secrets have. The plot is sometimes implausible but when a writer writes as well as Franzen it's very easy to suspend disbelief.
Empathy is probably the most important quality a novel has to create if it's going to hook you. This is more of a challenge if the characters are deeply unlikeable which is initially case with Purity. Secrets. Andreas has an overpowering mother and an unknown father. He also has an explosive secret; Pip also has an overpowering mother and an unknown father and she is a person from whom secrets are kept. Purity is a novel about the power secrets have. The plot is sometimes implausible but when a writer writes as well as Franzen it's very easy to suspend disbelief.
July 20, 2015
It would be better if we all read Franzen in a vacuum. Because as soon as his name comes into the picture, everything gets skewed. For better or for worse (though mostly the latter) his personality and image overtake his actual works and color what we say about them. While reading Purity I struggled to think of this as a book rather than a Franzen book. I tried to anticipate how people would react to it and whether their reactions would be valid or too thrown by the author.
With all those caveats, Purity continues Franzen's string of big novels that seem outwardly to be literary and about big-ideas and modern life and all that but are actually very readable and besides the occasional spouting of fancy literary-ness, are actually a lot more like regular old non-literary fiction than many would like to admit.
Yes, there are things in here that make it very difficult to forget that it's Franzen. I suspect many women who read the book will start the first section and feel the same squeamishness I did knowing that Franzen is writing about an attractive and damaged young woman. At times the parts of the book about Pip ring slightly false so that you'd suspect a middle-aged male is the author, but at many other times they ring sharp and true. And this is why I continue to read Franzen. Because sometimes he writes a sentence or a paragraph that breaks the skin and slices deep.
The novel is about secrets, inspired by a Julian Assange-like character who floats through the center of the book along with a few other connected characters. What we share about ourselves and what we don't. I don't know if it's Franzen's best, the pivotal character of Pip's mother is that type of mostly-functionally-crazy person that I always struggle to accept in fiction because so many people are held so firmly in their orbit which seems so utterly irrational.
I suspect many people will review the book and talk about its unlikable characters. And it's true, they're mostly unlikable. (And Pip is that classic example of a young female character who doesn't actually seem to have much of a personality besides her backstory and who people are continually drawn toward for reasons no one can know.) But I like books with unlikable characters, I don't think Franzen should get a bad rap for it when we often praise women for writing books with unlikable characters. And even though Franzen does get it wrong about women sometimes, he gets it right surprisingly often. And yes, ultimately, this book that starts out feeling like it is about women ends up feeling like it was all about men after all and that frustrates me. But it's a book worth talking about, it's a book I flew through in 2 days, it's fascinating and flawed at the same time.
With all those caveats, Purity continues Franzen's string of big novels that seem outwardly to be literary and about big-ideas and modern life and all that but are actually very readable and besides the occasional spouting of fancy literary-ness, are actually a lot more like regular old non-literary fiction than many would like to admit.
Yes, there are things in here that make it very difficult to forget that it's Franzen. I suspect many women who read the book will start the first section and feel the same squeamishness I did knowing that Franzen is writing about an attractive and damaged young woman. At times the parts of the book about Pip ring slightly false so that you'd suspect a middle-aged male is the author, but at many other times they ring sharp and true. And this is why I continue to read Franzen. Because sometimes he writes a sentence or a paragraph that breaks the skin and slices deep.
The novel is about secrets, inspired by a Julian Assange-like character who floats through the center of the book along with a few other connected characters. What we share about ourselves and what we don't. I don't know if it's Franzen's best, the pivotal character of Pip's mother is that type of mostly-functionally-crazy person that I always struggle to accept in fiction because so many people are held so firmly in their orbit which seems so utterly irrational.
I suspect many people will review the book and talk about its unlikable characters. And it's true, they're mostly unlikable. (And Pip is that classic example of a young female character who doesn't actually seem to have much of a personality besides her backstory and who people are continually drawn toward for reasons no one can know.) But I like books with unlikable characters, I don't think Franzen should get a bad rap for it when we often praise women for writing books with unlikable characters. And even though Franzen does get it wrong about women sometimes, he gets it right surprisingly often. And yes, ultimately, this book that starts out feeling like it is about women ends up feeling like it was all about men after all and that frustrates me. But it's a book worth talking about, it's a book I flew through in 2 days, it's fascinating and flawed at the same time.
January 12, 2018
Να λοιπον που τελειωσα το πρωτο μου βιβλιο τουΦρανζεν.οπωσδηποτε ενα βιβλιο που δεν μπορουσα να διαβασω γρηγορα..οι χαρακτηρες πολλοι και ο καθενας ειχε να πει τη δικη του ιστορια.η πρωταγωνιστρια του βιβλιου ειναι η Πιπ(η οποια αναζητα την πραγματικη ταυτοτητα του πατερα της μιας και η μητερα της αρνειται να της την αποκαλυψει)που εμφανιζεται στην αρχη και το τελος του και στη μεση παρεμβαλλονται πολλα αλλα προσωπα που αρχικα μοιαζουν άσχετα αλλα στην πορεια βλεπεις οτι ολα καπως συνδεονται και καλυπτουν ενα μεγαλο μυστικο..το βιβλιο αυτο μιλα ακομη κ για το πως οι ανθρωπινες σχεσεις καθοριζονται απο τα οικογενειακα βιωματα και ποσο δυσκολο ειναι να ξεφυγουμε απο αυτα τα βιωματα..γενικα απολαυσα σε πολυ μεγαλο βαθμο αυτο το βιβλιο απλα δεν καταλαβα για ποιο λογο θα επρεπε να ειναι τοσο μεγαλο.καπου με κουρασε η απεραντολογια και οριακα δε χαθηκε η σημασια των λεγομενων του συγγραφεα και η ξεχωριστη πλοκη μεσα στις πολλεεεεες σελιδες του ...
αυτο το βιβλιο σηματοδοτει την "γνωριμια" μου με τον Φρανζεν.ανυπομονω!!!
αυτο το βιβλιο σηματοδοτει την "γνωριμια" μου με τον Φρανζεν.ανυπομονω!!!
May 31, 2015
There are families, there are fucked-up families and there are fucked-up Franzen families - and boy, does he excel himself here.
I may have read this in a flu-induced delirium but I thought his equating the internet machine with the totalitarian state of the GDR was just inspired.
I may have read this in a flu-induced delirium but I thought his equating the internet machine with the totalitarian state of the GDR was just inspired.
July 28, 2015
While devouring this enjoyable, often brilliant novel, I also found myself trying to articulate just how exactly it differs from The Corrections and Freedom. It's got Franzen's usual pop-literary tone, his commentary on current events, his juicy psychologizing, his landscape of prescription abuse, family dysfunction and sexual pathology. Then halfway through, it finally hit me: Franzen was clearly hugely inspired by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. With its intense, battle-of-the-sexes storyline and a few suspense-thriller twists, this novel should/could cross over a bit in appeal to Flynn's fans who stick with it.
I think it's going to be a huge hit and deserves to be. It's masterfully plotted, the pieces fit together incredibly well, and it has powerful forward momentum. I predict it won't get much awards play, but I suspect the author was not looking for awards with this one.
While I've really enjoyed Franzen's novels, I'm also frankly fascinated with Franzen the one-man media controversy: the curmudgeon/Luddite, the amateur environmentalist, the whipping boy for every issue of sexism in publishing. He's made a fool of himself on more than one occasion, and I'd have expected his latest to have more protective armor, to be more stiff and serious and irreproachable.
Instead, he's having more outrageous fun than ever (and at times reminded me of Roth at his I-don't-give-a-f*&%-what-you-think-of-me best). He's taking far more risks than he needs to. And the novel also shows him dealing with his fame/infamy in a constructive, playful way, for example articulating the problems of the internet/social media with wit and eloquence but then putting it in the mind of a deeply deranged character. The gusto of the writing is contagious, and in many ways Franzen has never been more relevant.
I find myself resisting the extremity of the plot (and its few violent twists) but have to admit that given the subject matter it may be fully justified. Overall I found the novel's engagement with current popular fiction and current events to be thrilling and surprising. I'd rather see an author stretch out of their comfort zone and try something daring than just churn out more of the same. And even when I resisted the novel (which was rarely), I was enjoying it.
I think it's going to be a huge hit and deserves to be. It's masterfully plotted, the pieces fit together incredibly well, and it has powerful forward momentum. I predict it won't get much awards play, but I suspect the author was not looking for awards with this one.
While I've really enjoyed Franzen's novels, I'm also frankly fascinated with Franzen the one-man media controversy: the curmudgeon/Luddite, the amateur environmentalist, the whipping boy for every issue of sexism in publishing. He's made a fool of himself on more than one occasion, and I'd have expected his latest to have more protective armor, to be more stiff and serious and irreproachable.
Instead, he's having more outrageous fun than ever (and at times reminded me of Roth at his I-don't-give-a-f*&%-what-you-think-of-me best). He's taking far more risks than he needs to. And the novel also shows him dealing with his fame/infamy in a constructive, playful way, for example articulating the problems of the internet/social media with wit and eloquence but then putting it in the mind of a deeply deranged character. The gusto of the writing is contagious, and in many ways Franzen has never been more relevant.
I find myself resisting the extremity of the plot (and its few violent twists) but have to admit that given the subject matter it may be fully justified. Overall I found the novel's engagement with current popular fiction and current events to be thrilling and surprising. I'd rather see an author stretch out of their comfort zone and try something daring than just churn out more of the same. And even when I resisted the novel (which was rarely), I was enjoying it.
October 9, 2015
Can't think of much to say about a book that's been been dissected so widely and in so much detail, but feel obligated to explain something about why I liked it, so: I didn't love The Corrections, and after it I had little desire to read anything else by Franzen. It was the premise of this one specifically that dragged me in; that, and the fact that it got its claws into me early with the character of Purity (Pip) Tyler (a poorly written and implausible approximation of a young woman, according to many reviewers, yet I really saw my younger self in her and related to so many of her thoughts and insecurities; so who knows what that says about me). Pip is nominally the protagonist (or so the blurb would have you believe), and of course gives the book its title, but only a third of the book is dedicated solely to her, with the rest given to Julian Assange avatar Andreas Wolf and his Sunlight Project, and to Leila and Tom, two other characters who become significant to both Pip and Wolf for gradually-revealed reasons. Despite the apparent almost-zeitgesity themes of the cultural impact of the internet, surveillance and freedom of information/the death of privacy, Purity is really a generation-spanning epic that's mainly about fucked-up families and their fucked-up relationships - so it has more in common with Franzen's other novels than has often been suggested. I'd said to myself that I wouldn't finish Purity if at any point I really disliked it or started finding it horribly offensive, but these things never happened. Instead, I found the unfurling story ever-more mesmerising, the characters unforgettable, and in the end I was surprised by how much I had loved the experience of reading it.
(And no, this wasn't the exact edition I read, but I love this cover and I don't like the UK one, so I'm using it anyway.)
(And no, this wasn't the exact edition I read, but I love this cover and I don't like the UK one, so I'm using it anyway.)
November 14, 2019
Complimenti, davvero complimenti ad Andrea De Carlo per questo nuovo romanzo. Molto grande, molto romanzo, molto americano. Molto Grande Romanzo Americano, direi. Ve lo svelo subito: non è vero che si tratta di un romanzo di Andrea De Carlo, no, è di Jonathan Franzen. Sciocchini che non siete altro: Andrea De Carlo scrive mediocri romanzi italiani, Jonathan Franzen scrive il Grande Romanzo Americano. Di continuo e soprattutto consciamente. Lui si siede al tavolino e mica butta giù una storia, un dialogo, una cosa che gli è successa, no, lui compone il Grande Romanzo Americano. A furia di dirglielo, dev'essere che ha cominciato a crederci. E un sacco di gente appresso a lui. Salve, sono Jonathan Franzen e scrivo il Grande Romanzo Americano. E io invece sono Stefano e il Grande Romanzo Americano lo leggo, perché granderomanzoamericanamente parlando, non lascio nulla di intentato. Figuriamoci. Le avvisaglie che potesse trattarsi di opera da meritare i novantadue minuti di applausi c'erano tutte, ma le ho bellamente ignorate. La prima: un numero de IL (http://www.ilmagazine.ilsole24ore.com...) con il faccione di Franzen in copertina. La foto non è nemmeno brutta. Per chi non lo sapesse, IL è il mensile di Idee e Lifestyle del Sole 24 ORE, pluripremiato in Italia e all'estero per contenuti e grafica. Un magazine di attualità e di approfondimento, di svago e di divertimento, di opinioni e di provocazioni, di cultura e di consumi per la classe dirigente contemporanea e del futuro.
Ora, che c'entro io con un magazine siffatto non lo saprei spiegare, ma a parziale discolpa posso dire che leggo di tutto, dal giornalino della parrocchia al volantino di Mediaworld, per cui anche IL mi è capitato tra le mani. Che simpatia, però, uno che va a comprare IL perché sente di essere classe dirigente contemporanea e del futuro.
Classe Dirigente Contemporanea e del Futuro (di seguito CDCF) - "Mi dia IL" (con piglio da classe dirigente contemporanea e del futuro).
Giornalaio (di seguito G) - "Il cosa?" (con piglio da palle girate che è là dalle sette del mattino e classe dirigente non lo sarà mai, né ora né nel futuro)
CDCF - "IL!" (spazientito, la classe dirigente non ha tempo da perdere)
G - "Il?" (altrettanto spazientito, dietro c'è la fila, la vecchina che vuole Il mio Papa; l'adolescente brufoloso che aspetta l'ultimo numero di Metal Blood Hard Hammer e altre cose dure e pure a casaccio; il nostalgico che vuole il calendario con il duce, e siamo ad agosto; il pensionato rincoglionito che cerca il 3676° fascicolo di Costruisci il tuo galeone, c'è il remo in omaggio)
CDCF - "IL!" (insiste, ha fretta, deve vedere se il Dow Jones sta salendo, trasandarsi la barba incolta, cercare su internet una bici vintage, scroccare 50 euro a papà)
G - "Il? Ha detto il?" (un pensiero gli balena in mente)
CDCF - "Sì, proprio IL" (la soddisfazione traspare sotto i baffi)
G - "Arrivo" (esce di scena)
CDCF - "Grazie" (sorriso soddisfatto)
G - "Ecco" (porge Il più completo annuario delle maiale della provincia con Silvana, la più porca di Sondrio in copertina)
CDCF - "Ma per chi mi ha preso?" (scappa via indignato)
La seconda avvisaglia è stata questo articolo (http://www.ilpost.it/2016/03/11/16-fr...) del Post in cui vengono riportate sedici battute del nuovo romanzo di Franzen. Né quattordici, né diciassette: sedici. Ci sono perle come questa:
Vuoi dirmi almeno cos’è successo con mio padre?
e come questa:
Stai conoscendo i genitori. Questi sono i genitori.
Roba che uno sente il sapore del Grande Romanzo Americano, in queste battute. Sono sedici aforismi profondissimi che insidiano la mia frase preferita di tutti i tempi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE5BU....
La terza è ultima avvisaglia è stata più subdola. Dove abito io c'è un ristorante fighettino dove il cibo è molto buono, ma però sono un po' troppo fissati con l'impiattamento, con la vasocottura, con il letto di qualcosa, con la croccantezza di qualcos'altro, con il cibo come cultura e tutte queste altre amenità. Ebbene, cosa ho trovato in vetrina tra un tagliere di formaggi e una selezione di vini? Purity, messo là, tutto bianco, con la ragazza tossica in copertina.
Lo so, tre indizi non fanno una prova, ma la prossima volta che io sento parlare di un libro su IL, trovo sedici frasi sul Post e mi compare in vetrina in trattoria, per quanto mastercheffosa possa essere, ecco, io quel libro non lo leggo.
Ma veniamo a noi. Purity è la storia senza capo né coda di una ragazzina che si chiama Purity, appunto, che non conosce il nome della mamma e non sa chi sia il padre. Purity si fa chiamare Pip, ha un sacco di debiti, la mamma è una matta fricchettona uscita sparata da un libro di De Carlo, cerca il padre come in cartone animato strappalacrime, incontra gente strana, fa cose, vede gente. Non c'è niente di realistico, in questo Grande Romanzo Americano, né di vagamente verosimile. I personaggi sono delle pedine totalmente prive di spessore umano. Sembra quasi di vederlo, Franzen, costruirle a tavolino. Ora, io non dico di pescare a piene mani nel realismo più torbido, non siamo mica obbligati, ecco, ma almeno trarre spunto dalla realtà per raccontare una storia non sarebbe male. Invece no, Purity è solo un giochino letterario, un divertissement che tuttavia non diverte, una storia per niente vissuta e totalmente costruita.
Non c'è solo Pip, nel libro. Ci sono una marea di altre persone noiosissime che fanno cose a casaccio, confidano i segreti più intimi con il primo che incontrano, poi si pentono, cercano di rimediare. In ogni riga si avverte una sensazione di artefazione (si dice artefazione?). Insomma, in un buon libro un personaggio compie un'azione o dice qualcosa perché la coerenza (o incoerenza, a fare i tragressivi) della storia lo porta ad agire o dire in quel modo. In Purity no, in Purity fanno tutti qualcosa e si capisce che lo fanno perché Franzen ha deciso che così dev'essere. È pallosissimo. Ci sono sentimenti un tanto al chilo, discorsi a metà tra la telenovela piemontese e i dialoghi di un film porno italiano. Ragionano tutti, di continuo, sui massimi sistemi come liceali dopo una canna di troppo. Non c'è nessun senso dell'ironia, nessun sorriso, niente, solo pesantezza. Le uniche battute sono da boyscout:
Per metà gli credeva e per due terzi no.
C'è il ricorso al corsivo e alle Maiuscole per dare enfasi o chissà cosa, insopportabile come quelli che quando parlano fanno il gesto delle virgolette con le mani. Una roba, un'idea, un concetto, si buttano là, caro Jonathan (o cara traduttrice), e chi è in grado di cogliere che colga, senza occhiolini o toccatine di gomito.
Ogni tre pagine volevo mollarlo, chiuderlo, lasciarlo là. Ma poi mi veniva il dubbio: non è che sia io sbagliato e non riesca a capire tutta questa magnficenza? Sono andato avanti, ho fatto una fatica enorme a seguire una trama così inutilmente arzigogolata da fare invidia agli sceneggiatori di Beautiful, ma l'ho finito. C'è pure la trametta gialla con contoro di spy story. Possibile che questo sia il Grande Romanzo Americano e io non riesca a coglierlo? Ho dei problemi con David Foster Wallace, DeLillo l'ho iniziato quarantadue volte e non sono mai andato oltre le prime tre pagine, forse è davvero colpa mia. Forse però, perché Bret Easton Ellis ne leggerei uno al giorno, Philip Roth pure, mentre Franzen piuttosto la prossima volta rileggo un libro di Antonio Socci.
A proposito di Philip Roth. In Pastorale America c'è tutta la parte della fabbrica di guanti del padre dello Svedese. È noiosissima, inutile girarci attorno, ma mai, mai, Mai, mentre la leggevo mi veniva voglia di posare il libro. Sembrava di essere in quella fabbrica. Ancora un po' se mi avessero dato un tocco di pelle avrei potuto farlo io, il guanto. E invece prendiamo la descrizione della vita nella Germania Est in Purity. Noia altrettanta, e mai, mai, Mai, la sensazione che Franzen ci abbia raccontato qualcosa di vero, di verosimile, di probabile, di vivibile. Niente, solo inchiostro su carta (o pixel su display) e nessuna sensazione di immedesimazione.
Però ora basta che altrimenti questa recensione mi esce più lunga del romanzo e mi convinco di avere scritto la Grande Recensione Italiana.
Ora, che c'entro io con un magazine siffatto non lo saprei spiegare, ma a parziale discolpa posso dire che leggo di tutto, dal giornalino della parrocchia al volantino di Mediaworld, per cui anche IL mi è capitato tra le mani. Che simpatia, però, uno che va a comprare IL perché sente di essere classe dirigente contemporanea e del futuro.
Classe Dirigente Contemporanea e del Futuro (di seguito CDCF) - "Mi dia IL" (con piglio da classe dirigente contemporanea e del futuro).
Giornalaio (di seguito G) - "Il cosa?" (con piglio da palle girate che è là dalle sette del mattino e classe dirigente non lo sarà mai, né ora né nel futuro)
CDCF - "IL!" (spazientito, la classe dirigente non ha tempo da perdere)
G - "Il?" (altrettanto spazientito, dietro c'è la fila, la vecchina che vuole Il mio Papa; l'adolescente brufoloso che aspetta l'ultimo numero di Metal Blood Hard Hammer e altre cose dure e pure a casaccio; il nostalgico che vuole il calendario con il duce, e siamo ad agosto; il pensionato rincoglionito che cerca il 3676° fascicolo di Costruisci il tuo galeone, c'è il remo in omaggio)
CDCF - "IL!" (insiste, ha fretta, deve vedere se il Dow Jones sta salendo, trasandarsi la barba incolta, cercare su internet una bici vintage, scroccare 50 euro a papà)
G - "Il? Ha detto il?" (un pensiero gli balena in mente)
CDCF - "Sì, proprio IL" (la soddisfazione traspare sotto i baffi)
G - "Arrivo" (esce di scena)
CDCF - "Grazie" (sorriso soddisfatto)
G - "Ecco" (porge Il più completo annuario delle maiale della provincia con Silvana, la più porca di Sondrio in copertina)
CDCF - "Ma per chi mi ha preso?" (scappa via indignato)
La seconda avvisaglia è stata questo articolo (http://www.ilpost.it/2016/03/11/16-fr...) del Post in cui vengono riportate sedici battute del nuovo romanzo di Franzen. Né quattordici, né diciassette: sedici. Ci sono perle come questa:
Vuoi dirmi almeno cos’è successo con mio padre?
e come questa:
Stai conoscendo i genitori. Questi sono i genitori.
Roba che uno sente il sapore del Grande Romanzo Americano, in queste battute. Sono sedici aforismi profondissimi che insidiano la mia frase preferita di tutti i tempi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE5BU....
La terza è ultima avvisaglia è stata più subdola. Dove abito io c'è un ristorante fighettino dove il cibo è molto buono, ma però sono un po' troppo fissati con l'impiattamento, con la vasocottura, con il letto di qualcosa, con la croccantezza di qualcos'altro, con il cibo come cultura e tutte queste altre amenità. Ebbene, cosa ho trovato in vetrina tra un tagliere di formaggi e una selezione di vini? Purity, messo là, tutto bianco, con la ragazza tossica in copertina.
Lo so, tre indizi non fanno una prova, ma la prossima volta che io sento parlare di un libro su IL, trovo sedici frasi sul Post e mi compare in vetrina in trattoria, per quanto mastercheffosa possa essere, ecco, io quel libro non lo leggo.
Ma veniamo a noi. Purity è la storia senza capo né coda di una ragazzina che si chiama Purity, appunto, che non conosce il nome della mamma e non sa chi sia il padre. Purity si fa chiamare Pip, ha un sacco di debiti, la mamma è una matta fricchettona uscita sparata da un libro di De Carlo, cerca il padre come in cartone animato strappalacrime, incontra gente strana, fa cose, vede gente. Non c'è niente di realistico, in questo Grande Romanzo Americano, né di vagamente verosimile. I personaggi sono delle pedine totalmente prive di spessore umano. Sembra quasi di vederlo, Franzen, costruirle a tavolino. Ora, io non dico di pescare a piene mani nel realismo più torbido, non siamo mica obbligati, ecco, ma almeno trarre spunto dalla realtà per raccontare una storia non sarebbe male. Invece no, Purity è solo un giochino letterario, un divertissement che tuttavia non diverte, una storia per niente vissuta e totalmente costruita.
Non c'è solo Pip, nel libro. Ci sono una marea di altre persone noiosissime che fanno cose a casaccio, confidano i segreti più intimi con il primo che incontrano, poi si pentono, cercano di rimediare. In ogni riga si avverte una sensazione di artefazione (si dice artefazione?). Insomma, in un buon libro un personaggio compie un'azione o dice qualcosa perché la coerenza (o incoerenza, a fare i tragressivi) della storia lo porta ad agire o dire in quel modo. In Purity no, in Purity fanno tutti qualcosa e si capisce che lo fanno perché Franzen ha deciso che così dev'essere. È pallosissimo. Ci sono sentimenti un tanto al chilo, discorsi a metà tra la telenovela piemontese e i dialoghi di un film porno italiano. Ragionano tutti, di continuo, sui massimi sistemi come liceali dopo una canna di troppo. Non c'è nessun senso dell'ironia, nessun sorriso, niente, solo pesantezza. Le uniche battute sono da boyscout:
Per metà gli credeva e per due terzi no.
C'è il ricorso al corsivo e alle Maiuscole per dare enfasi o chissà cosa, insopportabile come quelli che quando parlano fanno il gesto delle virgolette con le mani. Una roba, un'idea, un concetto, si buttano là, caro Jonathan (o cara traduttrice), e chi è in grado di cogliere che colga, senza occhiolini o toccatine di gomito.
Ogni tre pagine volevo mollarlo, chiuderlo, lasciarlo là. Ma poi mi veniva il dubbio: non è che sia io sbagliato e non riesca a capire tutta questa magnficenza? Sono andato avanti, ho fatto una fatica enorme a seguire una trama così inutilmente arzigogolata da fare invidia agli sceneggiatori di Beautiful, ma l'ho finito. C'è pure la trametta gialla con contoro di spy story. Possibile che questo sia il Grande Romanzo Americano e io non riesca a coglierlo? Ho dei problemi con David Foster Wallace, DeLillo l'ho iniziato quarantadue volte e non sono mai andato oltre le prime tre pagine, forse è davvero colpa mia. Forse però, perché Bret Easton Ellis ne leggerei uno al giorno, Philip Roth pure, mentre Franzen piuttosto la prossima volta rileggo un libro di Antonio Socci.
A proposito di Philip Roth. In Pastorale America c'è tutta la parte della fabbrica di guanti del padre dello Svedese. È noiosissima, inutile girarci attorno, ma mai, mai, Mai, mentre la leggevo mi veniva voglia di posare il libro. Sembrava di essere in quella fabbrica. Ancora un po' se mi avessero dato un tocco di pelle avrei potuto farlo io, il guanto. E invece prendiamo la descrizione della vita nella Germania Est in Purity. Noia altrettanta, e mai, mai, Mai, la sensazione che Franzen ci abbia raccontato qualcosa di vero, di verosimile, di probabile, di vivibile. Niente, solo inchiostro su carta (o pixel su display) e nessuna sensazione di immedesimazione.
Però ora basta che altrimenti questa recensione mi esce più lunga del romanzo e mi convinco di avere scritto la Grande Recensione Italiana.
September 21, 2015
The primary theme in Franzen's new hefty novel is so clear and crisp that it swept me along with the plot, which is no small matter, as the plot is exciting and suspenseful. There are several overlapping themes, actually, but the polestar, in my perception, was about the duality of man, and how it antagonizes any presumption of moral absolution. The duality is demonstrated in many forms--literal and metaphorical.
Moral absolutism, as ironically wielded with the title "purity," was a philosophy of the Soviet State; one of the five main characters, perhaps the cardinal character, Andreas Wolf, grew up in Soviet Germany. Franzen illuminates sharply that when a population is forced to subjugate individualism to the Communist State, that these repressed feelings have to go somewhere. Intelligent people and outliers with rebellious natures are likely to act out their subversion in some way.
Andreas Wolf, a brilliant individual and the son of privileged communist parents, struggles with a duality that never ceases, provoked by the Communist rule and his mother's rule at home. His repression and subsequent rebellion is key to the unfolding of the story. His mother, an intellectual and academic, has been the most poignant influence on his life, and has caused the most pain, but he sublimates his feelings about his mother, and the Soviet Mother, until he can't. When the Wall comes down, he becomes a celebrity icon and eventually a rival to Julian Assange, the Wiki leaks iconoclast.
Now, it is the Internet that is the instrument of totalitarianism. The Internet's aim was to "liberate" humanity from the task of making things, learning things, or even remembering them. What had previously given meaning to life had been taken over by the Internet. And the Internet is now the formidable place for duality to flourish-- everyone can have an avatar, or present a different face to the public.
"Who even cared about what a person's private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn't exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The internet meant death..."
Andreas also has some toxic secrets that could derail him at any moment. "There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known...Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness."
There's Pip Tyler, the comely 20-something year-old with a $130,000 student debt, who literally doesn't know her origins--her real birth date, who her father is, or her mother's real name. She has been begging her mother her entire life to tell her, only to be shut down. Her adult quest in life is to find out the truth of who she is, and to find her father. In essence, she has been living a dual existence--the legitimate person she was born as is hidden away in her mother's secret compartment of sorts, and Pip is stuck with the lie. Her relationship with her mother is a mixture of love and resentment. She is currently adrift in aimless jobs and a dead-end life. When she gets an offer from Andreas Wolf to work for him up at his cult-ish nerd center in Bolivia, she is intrigued.
Then there are Denver journalists Tom Aberrant, and his still-married long-term lover, Leila Helou, who, although not altogether against Internet journalism, still believe in the purity of boots-to-the-ground journalism. As we go back to details of Tom's early years with his ex-wife, Anabel, we are introduced to possibly the most entertainingly dysfunctional couple since anything that Philip Roth ever described. Anabel's moral absolutism, her insistence on a singular way of art and poverty, was a burden that Tom could neither live with or escape. Leila's husband Charles, the failed writer, keeps Leila tethered to him, also.
Franzen mostly leaves the final dissections of character up to the reader, but there's no lack of ongoing paradoxes to explore human nature. "And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn't keep working with her." Our inner contradictions and the dark parts of ourselves that wreak havoc on our lives are examined through our strengths that give way to our fallibility, and our fallibility that gives way to our strengths. Every character plays the Purity card in one way or another, but it is the Blemish one that keeps making them all so human.
Although the themes are what make the story so tantalizing, Franzen also creates a combination domestic drama and thriller. Like a Venn diagram, the characters overlap and also circle each other throughout the novel. It is divided up into sections, and its non-linear construction works to intensify the drama at hand. Eventually, a seamless narrative is completed, one that is bittersweet and credible.
Moral absolutism, as ironically wielded with the title "purity," was a philosophy of the Soviet State; one of the five main characters, perhaps the cardinal character, Andreas Wolf, grew up in Soviet Germany. Franzen illuminates sharply that when a population is forced to subjugate individualism to the Communist State, that these repressed feelings have to go somewhere. Intelligent people and outliers with rebellious natures are likely to act out their subversion in some way.
Andreas Wolf, a brilliant individual and the son of privileged communist parents, struggles with a duality that never ceases, provoked by the Communist rule and his mother's rule at home. His repression and subsequent rebellion is key to the unfolding of the story. His mother, an intellectual and academic, has been the most poignant influence on his life, and has caused the most pain, but he sublimates his feelings about his mother, and the Soviet Mother, until he can't. When the Wall comes down, he becomes a celebrity icon and eventually a rival to Julian Assange, the Wiki leaks iconoclast.
Now, it is the Internet that is the instrument of totalitarianism. The Internet's aim was to "liberate" humanity from the task of making things, learning things, or even remembering them. What had previously given meaning to life had been taken over by the Internet. And the Internet is now the formidable place for duality to flourish-- everyone can have an avatar, or present a different face to the public.
"Who even cared about what a person's private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn't exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The internet meant death..."
Andreas also has some toxic secrets that could derail him at any moment. "There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known...Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness."
There's Pip Tyler, the comely 20-something year-old with a $130,000 student debt, who literally doesn't know her origins--her real birth date, who her father is, or her mother's real name. She has been begging her mother her entire life to tell her, only to be shut down. Her adult quest in life is to find out the truth of who she is, and to find her father. In essence, she has been living a dual existence--the legitimate person she was born as is hidden away in her mother's secret compartment of sorts, and Pip is stuck with the lie. Her relationship with her mother is a mixture of love and resentment. She is currently adrift in aimless jobs and a dead-end life. When she gets an offer from Andreas Wolf to work for him up at his cult-ish nerd center in Bolivia, she is intrigued.
Then there are Denver journalists Tom Aberrant, and his still-married long-term lover, Leila Helou, who, although not altogether against Internet journalism, still believe in the purity of boots-to-the-ground journalism. As we go back to details of Tom's early years with his ex-wife, Anabel, we are introduced to possibly the most entertainingly dysfunctional couple since anything that Philip Roth ever described. Anabel's moral absolutism, her insistence on a singular way of art and poverty, was a burden that Tom could neither live with or escape. Leila's husband Charles, the failed writer, keeps Leila tethered to him, also.
Franzen mostly leaves the final dissections of character up to the reader, but there's no lack of ongoing paradoxes to explore human nature. "And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn't keep working with her." Our inner contradictions and the dark parts of ourselves that wreak havoc on our lives are examined through our strengths that give way to our fallibility, and our fallibility that gives way to our strengths. Every character plays the Purity card in one way or another, but it is the Blemish one that keeps making them all so human.
Although the themes are what make the story so tantalizing, Franzen also creates a combination domestic drama and thriller. Like a Venn diagram, the characters overlap and also circle each other throughout the novel. It is divided up into sections, and its non-linear construction works to intensify the drama at hand. Eventually, a seamless narrative is completed, one that is bittersweet and credible.
August 17, 2016
I thought both The Corrections and Freedom were terrific books and Franzen a world class author. I still find him a fabulous writer but, really, what is Purity all about? I have no idea what the point of the book was. I am not saying there should always be a clear point in a book, but this was getting really tedious. I even don't get why one of the main characters had to be a East-German, as his story might as well have occured somewhere else. Well, might have made the man more mysterious and cosmopolitan, I assume. I gave the book 3 stars, one star for creating one of the most obnoxious and irritating women I have ever encountered in a book. He did an amazing job in that respect.
September 8, 2015
I fear that, like Lena Dunham, Franzen is someone whose "love to hate him!" persona is actually not a distraction from the greatness of his work, but, secretly, the most interesting thing about him. Is that harsh? He is a very good writer, no doubt. And I tend to defend a lot of the clueless things he says in the media as guileless but refreshingly honest. But reading Purity, I came to the unsettling conclusion that his issues with women are not, in fact, just a personality clash with Jennifer Weiner, but an actual blind spot and handicap that lowers the quality of his work.
Lucy, the female character in the book to whom I related the most - one of, or perhaps the only, women who consistently communicates her needs directly, albeit clumsily - is described as "[not] fat, but getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs" (in reference to her enjoyment of baking and consuming desserts from the Moosewood cookbook) - a description so deliciously apt, and yet so ... misogynistic, particularly in contrast to the character of her quasi-anorexic friend Anabel, and the uncontrollable attraction that the current narrator, Tom (who seems to be a clear Franzen stand-in, baby face and all) has to "the thinness of her upper arms."
Pip, the main character, is described physically in broad strokes, but early on in the book we are reassured, by an ostensibly upsetting, but clearly important to include, text message from a guy she's just made out with, that she has a "nice face, fantastic body."
The book is populated by women who are either fantastically gorgeous (Annagret, Anabel, all the interns), specifically unattractive to the narrator(s) (Moosewoody Lucy, Tom's mother with her steroid-inflated face), or, like Pip and Leila, not overtly gorgeous but, no worries, actually super attractive once you look closely.
From someone as smart as Franzen, this doesn't feel like a simple oversight, but rather like the unsettling revelation of a worldview that I can't abide by.
Now, off to bake some vegan deserts, which I plan to eat with gusto. Lucies of the world, feel free to come over and share. Let's talk about all those "nice" baby faced guys who messed with our heads before we were smart enough to know better.
Lucy, the female character in the book to whom I related the most - one of, or perhaps the only, women who consistently communicates her needs directly, albeit clumsily - is described as "[not] fat, but getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs" (in reference to her enjoyment of baking and consuming desserts from the Moosewood cookbook) - a description so deliciously apt, and yet so ... misogynistic, particularly in contrast to the character of her quasi-anorexic friend Anabel, and the uncontrollable attraction that the current narrator, Tom (who seems to be a clear Franzen stand-in, baby face and all) has to "the thinness of her upper arms."
Pip, the main character, is described physically in broad strokes, but early on in the book we are reassured, by an ostensibly upsetting, but clearly important to include, text message from a guy she's just made out with, that she has a "nice face, fantastic body."
The book is populated by women who are either fantastically gorgeous (Annagret, Anabel, all the interns), specifically unattractive to the narrator(s) (Moosewoody Lucy, Tom's mother with her steroid-inflated face), or, like Pip and Leila, not overtly gorgeous but, no worries, actually super attractive once you look closely.
From someone as smart as Franzen, this doesn't feel like a simple oversight, but rather like the unsettling revelation of a worldview that I can't abide by.
Now, off to bake some vegan deserts, which I plan to eat with gusto. Lucies of the world, feel free to come over and share. Let's talk about all those "nice" baby faced guys who messed with our heads before we were smart enough to know better.
December 31, 2015
(Nearly 4.5) Part 1 may be tedious, but from Part 2 onwards, I found this immersive, even action-packed (hey, there’s a murder and a suicide!). Perhaps Franzen could have structured the narrative differently by starting with Andreas and then moving to Purity? By starting and ending with Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler, however, he emphasizes his debt to Dickens: shades of both Bleak House and Great Expectations are there in the discovery of true parentage and unexpected riches, and I also spotted an echo of the latter in the inconclusive but cautiously optimistic ending line. My favorite part, though, is “le1o9n8a0rd”: the longest section and the only one in the first person, it’s Tom’s memoir of his ex-wife, Anabel.
As per usual with Franzen, the novel repeats the title phrase and variations thereof as often as possible, with multiple meanings teased out: it’s a main character’s name, but also the virtue (“She was horribly poor but her sheets were clean; she was rich in cleanliness”; “nougat cores of innocence”), a state of totality (“purely”), and so on. It’s perhaps not quite as successful as the term “freedom” in this respect, but overall I think the novel matches its predecessor.
Despite Franzen’s legendary technophobia, he generally gets it right with Andreas Wolf (an East German whistleblower with similarities to Assange and Snowden, though both are also referenced by name here) and his Project Sunlight:
But, at the same time, “Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology.”
His observations regarding journalism are spot-on, too:
Purity is strong on the level of character and theme. Secrecy, isolation and compassion are recurring topics. I also enjoyed seeing how a codependent relationship with a mother is often repeated with a lover (e.g. for Tom, Clelia -> Leila). Names in general are interesting to trace, like Tom Aberant (= Aberrant?) and the close echoes of Andreas, Annagret and Anabel. Rather alarmingly, I could see a lot of myself in Anabel, especially her hermit tendencies and her sensitivity to smell. Franzen gets a lot of stick for his unpleasant characters, but I find them true to life and memorable.
East Germany, Bolivia and Oakland, California: Franzen doesn’t quite pull all his settings and storylines together, but this is close. With a more dynamic opening section, it might have been a 5-star read.
As per usual with Franzen, the novel repeats the title phrase and variations thereof as often as possible, with multiple meanings teased out: it’s a main character’s name, but also the virtue (“She was horribly poor but her sheets were clean; she was rich in cleanliness”; “nougat cores of innocence”), a state of totality (“purely”), and so on. It’s perhaps not quite as successful as the term “freedom” in this respect, but overall I think the novel matches its predecessor.
Despite Franzen’s legendary technophobia, he generally gets it right with Andreas Wolf (an East German whistleblower with similarities to Assange and Snowden, though both are also referenced by name here) and his Project Sunlight:
it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.
He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to some realer than his physical self.
But, at the same time, “Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology.”
His observations regarding journalism are spot-on, too:
Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive.
The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension.
Purity is strong on the level of character and theme. Secrecy, isolation and compassion are recurring topics. I also enjoyed seeing how a codependent relationship with a mother is often repeated with a lover (e.g. for Tom, Clelia -> Leila). Names in general are interesting to trace, like Tom Aberant (= Aberrant?) and the close echoes of Andreas, Annagret and Anabel. Rather alarmingly, I could see a lot of myself in Anabel, especially her hermit tendencies and her sensitivity to smell. Franzen gets a lot of stick for his unpleasant characters, but I find them true to life and memorable.
East Germany, Bolivia and Oakland, California: Franzen doesn’t quite pull all his settings and storylines together, but this is close. With a more dynamic opening section, it might have been a 5-star read.
June 8, 2018
şimdi baktım, on dört günde bitirmişim bu romanı. kısa zamanlarda, aralarda, az az okudum. yolculuklarda, işyerinin öğlen tatillerinde, hastanede, gürültülü kantinlerde, kafelerin yeni yeni oturmaya başladığım sigara içilmeyen bölümlerinde. okurken uyuyakaldığım oldu. sabah uyanıp ilk iş sırt çantama koyduğum ama hiç çıkarmadan akşam geri getirdiğim günler oldu. kitap yıprandı, hırpalandı, böylece benim kitabım oldu sonunda ve ben mutlu oldum bu kitabı okuduğum için.
mutluluk veren bir hikaye yok kitapta elbette. aksine hikaye mutsuz insanlarla dolu, zaman zaman yoruyor, can sıkıyor, sinir bozuyor. ama hikayenin üstünde, ötesinde bir dünyası var bu kitabın.
mutluluk sebebi, bu dünyaya girebilmek bir okur olarak. orada, o dünyanın kendine özgü zamanını hissetmek, mekanlarında dolaşmak, o dünyanın insanlarının arasında yaşamak, onların kendileriyle, birbirleriyle ve dünyayla ilişkilerinin tanığı olmak… iyi hikaye okuma keyfinden çok farklı bu. istendiğinde girip çıkabilen başka bir dünya, o dünyada başka bir ben ve o başka benin başka bir hayatı varmış hissi gibi. bu hissi sadece büyük romanlar verebilir.
saflık, okuduğum üçüncü franzen romanı oldu. başlarken nasıl bir romanla karşılaşabileceğime dair bir fikrim vardı. özgürlük ve düzeltmeler’e çok benzer bir roman okuyacaktım, onlardan biraz daha renkli, biraz daha neşeli ve iyimser olsun istiyordum ama olmayacaktı muhtemelen. romanları dışında türkçeye çevrilen tek deneme kitabından, çok az da hakkında yazılan çizilenlerden tanıdığım franzen pek değişecek, şaşırtıcı şeyler deneyecek bir yazara benzemiyordu. nihayetinde düşündüğüm gibi de oldu: saflık’ı tam olarak iki kitabının arasına yerleştirdim hatta. ikisinden farkı biraz daha kolay okunması, hem tema hem coğrafya olarak daha geniş bir alana yayılması olabilir kısaca.
daha önce düzeltmeler için çok iyi olmasa da bir yorum yazdığım için dört yıldızımı verip geçecektim burada saflık’a. ama romanın beşyüzlü sayfalarında, sadece ve sadece büyük romanlar yazdığı, büyük roman yazmakta ısrar ve inat ettiği için, büyük roman okuma hissinden bahsetmeye ve beş yıldız vermeye karar verdim. büyük romanları seviyorum ben.
mutluluk veren bir hikaye yok kitapta elbette. aksine hikaye mutsuz insanlarla dolu, zaman zaman yoruyor, can sıkıyor, sinir bozuyor. ama hikayenin üstünde, ötesinde bir dünyası var bu kitabın.
mutluluk sebebi, bu dünyaya girebilmek bir okur olarak. orada, o dünyanın kendine özgü zamanını hissetmek, mekanlarında dolaşmak, o dünyanın insanlarının arasında yaşamak, onların kendileriyle, birbirleriyle ve dünyayla ilişkilerinin tanığı olmak… iyi hikaye okuma keyfinden çok farklı bu. istendiğinde girip çıkabilen başka bir dünya, o dünyada başka bir ben ve o başka benin başka bir hayatı varmış hissi gibi. bu hissi sadece büyük romanlar verebilir.
saflık, okuduğum üçüncü franzen romanı oldu. başlarken nasıl bir romanla karşılaşabileceğime dair bir fikrim vardı. özgürlük ve düzeltmeler’e çok benzer bir roman okuyacaktım, onlardan biraz daha renkli, biraz daha neşeli ve iyimser olsun istiyordum ama olmayacaktı muhtemelen. romanları dışında türkçeye çevrilen tek deneme kitabından, çok az da hakkında yazılan çizilenlerden tanıdığım franzen pek değişecek, şaşırtıcı şeyler deneyecek bir yazara benzemiyordu. nihayetinde düşündüğüm gibi de oldu: saflık’ı tam olarak iki kitabının arasına yerleştirdim hatta. ikisinden farkı biraz daha kolay okunması, hem tema hem coğrafya olarak daha geniş bir alana yayılması olabilir kısaca.
daha önce düzeltmeler için çok iyi olmasa da bir yorum yazdığım için dört yıldızımı verip geçecektim burada saflık’a. ama romanın beşyüzlü sayfalarında, sadece ve sadece büyük romanlar yazdığı, büyük roman yazmakta ısrar ve inat ettiği için, büyük roman okuma hissinden bahsetmeye ve beş yıldız vermeye karar verdim. büyük romanları seviyorum ben.
November 10, 2023
Франзен е поредният кандидат за автор на голям съвременен американски роман.
Харесах стилът му и изграждането на героите, но рязко загубих интерес към случващото се в последната третина от романа, може би защото нищо за разгадаване не бе останало, пък аз обичам да ме държат в напрежение почти до края. Някак много захаросано за моя вкус приключи тази длъжка история. Пип не заслужаваше да я завърши в такава кретенска идилия...
Натрапва се сравнението с творчеството на Тарт, но си мисля, че и двамата са доста далеч от желаното постижение.
Изборът на герои - социални аутсайдери и на такива, повредени до степен на невъзможност за нормално общуване върви до някъде, но не се изплаща в дългосрочен план, а романите и на двамцата са бая обемни.
Разкри ми се обаче една Америка, за която не бях подозирал че съществува. Теченията и пластовете в този съвременен Вавилон са много по-дълбоки и интересни отколкото очаквах, въпреки че съм имал възможност нееднократно на място да се докосна до тях, а всекидневно това става чрез новините и културата им.
Най ми допадна частта за живота на Андреас в ГДР, мисля че писателят добре се е подготвил и успешно е предал развалата на строя, създал тази държава-урод.
Анабел е истинско чудовище и лудостта ѝ не я оправдава. Единственият силно недостоверен главен герой в книгата.
През цялото време докато четях за Пип, пред погледа ми се мяркаше ето тази жена:
Мисля, че би я изиграла страхотно. :)
В заключение - книгата ми хареса, ще прочета и други на Франзен.
Цитати:
"Ужасно е да бъдеш известен, Пип. И въпреки това всички искат да бъдат известни, с това се изчерпва днешният свят: желанието да бъдеш известен."
"Светът е пренаселен с бъбривци, а слушателите недостигат."
Това обяснява много добре според мен, светкавичния успех на социалните мрежи.
Харесах стилът му и изграждането на героите, но рязко загубих интерес към случващото се в последната третина от романа, може би защото нищо за разгадаване не бе останало, пък аз обичам да ме държат в напрежение почти до края. Някак много захаросано за моя вкус приключи тази длъжка история. Пип не заслужаваше да я завърши в такава кретенска идилия...
Натрапва се сравнението с творчеството на Тарт, но си мисля, че и двамата са доста далеч от желаното постижение.
Изборът на герои - социални аутсайдери и на такива, повредени до степен на невъзможност за нормално общуване върви до някъде, но не се изплаща в дългосрочен план, а романите и на двамцата са бая обемни.
Разкри ми се обаче една Америка, за която не бях подозирал че съществува. Теченията и пластовете в този съвременен Вавилон са много по-дълбоки и интересни отколкото очаквах, въпреки че съм имал възможност нееднократно на място да се докосна до тях, а всекидневно това става чрез новините и културата им.
Най ми допадна частта за живота на Андреас в ГДР, мисля че писателят добре се е подготвил и успешно е предал развалата на строя, създал тази държава-урод.
Анабел е истинско чудовище и лудостта ѝ не я оправдава. Единственият силно недостоверен главен герой в книгата.
През цялото време докато четях за Пип, пред погледа ми се мяркаше ето тази жена:
Мисля, че би я изиграла страхотно. :)
В заключение - книгата ми хареса, ще прочета и други на Франзен.
Цитати:
"Ужасно е да бъдеш известен, Пип. И въпреки това всички искат да бъдат известни, с това се изчерпва днешният свят: желанието да бъдеш известен."
"Светът е пренаселен с бъбривци, а слушателите недостигат."
Това обяснява много добре според мен, светкавичния успех на социалните мрежи.
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