“It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.” “My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work. In the spirit of high-school English class, let’s try a “close reading” of an early passage: As an object of ridicule, it is entertaining and instructive. Purity’s plot sags as badly as its dialogue, such that the novel feels less like a work of art, with all its ambiguities, ironies, and complexities, and more like an overlong and thinly veiled excuse for Franzen to dully declaim his conception of life in the twenty-first century.Īs entertainment, Purity is a failure. Instead, we get a mishmash of Pip’s early-twenties struggles, her mom’s batty solitude, and Internet whistleblowers from Germany-the last of which is Franzen’s naked and futile attempt to claim relevance, or some understanding of the world. The novel’s plot is little more than a vehicle for these jokes and “social observations”-which would be fine, were they at all pithy or original. Purity tries harder than these books, and fails more miserably-though we’re told Pip, its heroine, is “like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail.” You can always count on Franzen to make a lame joke six years too late, just like a parent without self-awareness. The prose from the early chapters is less polished than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and the sex is less sexy than Fifty Shades of Grey. In this way, Purity, whose author aspires to universality in a way only an author contemptuous and jealous of pulp can, is worse than lowbrow genre fiction. Even the very first line, spoken by one of Franzen’s “characters,” is unbelievable: “Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice”-the voice that of no human who has ever walked this earth, except an inept and pretentious novelist. It is obvious from its first page that Purity is a worthless novel and its author, Jonathan Franzen, a worthless writer.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen