Purity
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate
In 2010, Jonathan Franzen’s solemn-looking head famously appeared on the cover of Time, poised primly beside the headline ‘Great American Novelist’. The head has not exactly resisted this mantle. It has appeared in author photographs for subsequent Big Novels titled and organised around Big Ideas – 2010’s Freedom and this latest release, Purity. From the pages of magazine interviews and articles, it has tutted and gazed sternly down at those writers and styles of writing it deems Inappropriate for this Current Cultural Moment: namely, experimental, difficult, media-centric or self-reflexively postmodernist work. And ultimately, it is difficult to read Franzen without feeling the presence of the head, insisting – mostly erroneously – that its writing is important. Certainly, Purity works its way through significant – even relevant – concepts.
Three main stories interweave. Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler, a meandering twenty-something raised in a cabin, finds her place in a society where seemingly good causes are contaminated by ego and spite. Her (third-person) narrative acts as an unsubtle frame for reflections on post Gen-X life, these being mainly expressed through hackneyed notions of activism and troubling understandings of sexuality. The second story is that of Andreas Wolf, who moves from rebelling against East German communism to fighting global corruption through a ‘relatively pure’ version of Wikileaks. This premise allows both for cringey ponderings on The Internet (hint: it’s just as totalitarian as East Germany!), and for a genuinely interesting study of a megalomaniacal mind. The final narrative thread deals with two fairly likable magazine journalists, who also trade in exposing moral rot, and whose lives awkwardly dramatise the key ethical questions of the day. Franzen is a sharp plot architect, and his narratives interweave in ways both unexpected and engaging. And yet, each story finally becomes a hollow vessel for Important Ideas. By expelling the messiness of character, language art and experimentation from his book, Franzen attains a novelistic purity that is sorely limited.
Words: Gillian Moore
