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. Unfortunately, what he did with it was to bore me and make me feel uncomfortable all at once. 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. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i liked it a lot. 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.Īnd that surprised me. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

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 a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. 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. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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. 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.Įnter the Germans. 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. A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom

Purity franzen