Purity
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4.0 • 37 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom.
Jonathan Franzen's huge-canvased new book is about identity, the Internet, sexual politics, and love--among countless other things. It's deeply troubling, richly moving, and hilarious--featuring an unforgettable cast of inimitable Franzenian characters who grapple mightily and rewardingly with the great issues of our time and culture.
Purity Tyler, known to all as Pip, is an outspoken, forthright young woman struggling to make a life for herself. She sleeps in an rickety commune in Oakland. She's in love with an unavailable older man and is saddled with staggering college debt. She has a crazy mother and doesn't know who her father is. A chance encounter leads her to an internship in South America with the world-famous Sunlight Project, which uses the internet to expose government and corporate fraud and malfeasance. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic genius who grew up privileged but disaffected in the German Democratic Republic. Forced to run TSP in Bolivia because of the hostility of European nations whose misdeeds he has exposed, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand. Like numerous women before her, she becomes obsessed with Andreas, and they have an intense, unsettling relationship. Eventually, he finds her work at an online magazine in Denver with Tom Aberant, who, with his life partner, Leila Helou, uses old-fashioned reporting to achieve some of the same results that TSP seems to pull out of thin air.
That's the top story. What lies underneath is a wild tale of hidden identities, secret wealth, neurotic fidelity, sociopathy and murder. The truth of Pip's parentage lies at the center of this maelstrom, but before it is resolved Franzen takes us from the rain-drenched forests of northern California, to paranoid East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, to the paradisiacal mountain valleys of Bolivia, exposing us to the vagaries of radical politics, the problematic seductions of the internet, and the no-holds-barred war between the sexes.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jonathan Franzen has a knack for writing about psychological dysfunction and stirring up controversy with his cutting portraits of contemporary America. Purity fits the bill of a Franzen novel—a big, bold takedown of the global finance machine, gender dynamics, Internet crusaders, and more. But in Purity “Pip” Tyler, the American author has also created a flawed young heroine who’s surprisingly likable. Staring down life in an Oakland squat house, a demeaning job with an unscrupulous renewable energy company, and her tortured relationship with her hippie mom, Pip decides to embark on an overseas adventure that might help her find her father and erase a mountain of student debt. We got completely wrapped up in this modern epic, which is filled with intelligent, funny insights about the challenges of finding your inner truth in an exceptionally noisy age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Secrets are power, and power corrupts even the most idealistic in Franzen's (Freedom) exhaustive bildungsroman. Two years out of college, self-conscious, acerbic Purity "Pip" Tyler is saddled with crushing student loans and an overbearing, emotionally disturbed mother who refuses to reveal the identity of Pip's father. Living in Oakland, Calif., Pip meets and confides in beautiful German activist Annagret, who calls on her former boyfriend, Andreas Wolf, to give Pip an internship working with Wolf's cultish Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-like operation based in Bolivia. Once there, Pip is both flattered by and suspicious of the attention she receives from the magnetic Wolf; when she returns to America to do his bidding in secret, she becomes increasingly attached to people he may want to hurt. Pip strives to retain her integrity, but the world in which she is coming of age is, in Franzen's view, sick, its people born only to suffer and harm. Mining the connection between Pip and Wolf, Franzen renders half a dozen characters over the course of six decades, via extensive origin stories that plumb their psychological corners. Franzen succeeds more than he fails, but the failures are damning. At first, the mercurial, angry Pip and the arrogant, abrasive Wolf seem drawn to actively challenge the reader's sympathies. Then there are the novel's fathers, who are almost all abusive or absent, and its mothers, who are disturbed, cruel, or dumb. Gradually, it becomes clear that Franzen's greatest strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web which includes a murder in Berlin, stolen nukes in Amarillo, and a billion-dollar trust. Though the novel lacks resonance, its pieces fit together with stunning craftsmanship.
Customer Reviews
Purity
Johnathan Franzen has written several novels, now four of which I have read. "Purity", although good, and well thought out, presented me with a few burrs, a few tsk-tsks that I feel deflated about. The main one is how Franzen, who is obviously a pretty smart guy, would use a story such as this to promote his stand, personally, on the biggest farce of all time-climate change. How anybody has the audacity to suggest that climate change even exists, and that mankind is responsible for it, and more laughable to think he can do something about it is disappointing. He has obviously hung around with too many nitwits like Neil Young and it has skewed what would otherwise be a pretty sharp thought process, a process that has produced a few good works of fiction.
Also, I would like to add that to me, Franzen has horseshoes up his -ss, to be able to snub Oprah, and then be invited back to speak to her, on a subsequent Book of the Month pick.
Purity is very, very long, and thankfully I was afforded the opportunity to read it in long stretches, to keep the characters, places and time frames straight, during his bouts of jumping as he unveiled the story.
Yes, Franzen is good, but not so good in my mind that I am going to delve into any of his forthcoming offerings. He has obviously reached the zenith of literary stardom and has taken the notion to get a bit too political for my liking. Sad, really.