The big book

Somewhere in the latter half of Purity , Jonathan Franzen’s new book, a mother and son are in the middle of the latest series of awkward conversations. He is trying to convince her that she should opt out of a screening of his girlfriend’s graduation project. He warns her: “It’s just not going to make sense to you. It’s about the properties of film as a purely expressive medium.” Undeterred, she responds: “I love a good movie.” But 24-minutes of watching scenes of a cow in a slaughterhouse spliced with scenes of Miss Kansas being crowned Miss America, followed by a confrontation with the girlfriend herself, is enough to break even this mother. “I’ve had some rough days,” she tells her son as he puts her in a cab, “But I think this has been the worst day of my life.”

That scene is one of my favourites in Purity — bestriding as it does hilarity and heartbreak. The disappointment of the parent in child is entirely mutual; bogged down in embarrassment, laced with cruelty, undergirded by expectations that have once again gone unfulfilled.

Franzen whom Time magazine famously dubbed ‘The Great American Novelist’, returns not only to familiar themes but a familiar structure with Purity . The book is broken into sections, with characters providing competing perspectives. We leap across time and space from section to section, moving from East Germany in the last days before the Wall fell to a start-up in Denver intent on breaking a story about a stolen nuke; from an exploitative renewable energy company in Oakland to the campus of a Wikileaks like outfit in an unspoilt valley somewhere in Bolivia. Eventually, a murder becomes the thread that drives the book forward and ties all these disparate sections together.

At the heart of the novel is Purity, known to all as Pip. In one of several small nods to Dickens, Pip has great expectations and a mystery to solve — she wants desperately to know who her father is. Her relationship with her flighty mother is both strange and unhealthy. Pip is “like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail, an employee too indispensable to be fired for bad attitude.”

Aside from her, two men dominate the other sections of the book. (A fourth character, the journalist Leila Helou is interesting but does not linger for very long.) The first is the deeply disturbed yet equally charismatic Andreas Wolf. Wolf is the head of the Sunlight Project, a friend to leakers of secret documents and a fierce rival to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. The latter Wolf memorably dismisses as an “autistic megalomaniac sex creep”.

Underneath the gloss, Wolf seems to fantasise about throttling just about every woman he spends more than five minutes with — a streak of homicidal instability that his one-time friend and ally, the journalist Tom Aberant, suspects. It sours the relationship between the two men, pitting them against each other. In the mix is Tom’s ex-wife and heiress Anabel Laird and both men’s dysfunctional mothers. (One can’t help noting that their fathers seem to be paragons of virtue in comparison, but then Franzen has a predilection for hysterical and manipulative women, who more often than not also turn out to be certifiable.)

Purity may be the name of a character in this book, but you could be forgiven for assuming it is a theme. Characters aspire to it, pursue it, and realise it is beyond their grasp. Franzen has always been frank about his own youthful idealism but here he equates it with self-deception — the greater the idealism, the greater the deception.

If you haven’t read Franzen, read him for the humour he brings to his observations of the minutiae of modern American life; read him for the unflinching way he probes the uneasy depths of relationships both familial and romantic, for his confrontation of histories that refuse to go away and his acknowledgement of the frustrations of duty and expectations. Do not, for the love of god, read him for his plots or for his treatment of women in his novels.

As Franzen intended, this is a big book — both literally and metaphorically. The authors uses the lives of his characters as a facade upon which he reproduces the great debates of our times: the hypocrisy lurking in the dark basement of internet activism and the studied construction of personality in the vast open spaces of social media; the ongoing demolition of traditional journalism and the appearance of mass surveillance in every aspect of our lives, all allow Franzen to hold fourth in way that is both provocative and insightful.

Where the book stumbles is in its over-reliance on multiple characters who, to put it politely, are out of their minds — this is particularly true of Tom Aberant’s ex-wife and Andrea’s Wolf mother, at whose doorstep the absurdities of her son are laid. It is their bizarre, often inexplicable choices that Franzen leans on heavily as he attempts to drive the narrative forward.

In the end Purity is still a topical, entertaining read, filled with passages that will linger in your thoughts but Franzen, so often derided for being among the most famous representatives of white male hegemony in the literary world, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind on that count with this book.

Smriti Danielis a Colombo-based journalist

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