Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Purity

It would be better if we all read Franzen in a vacuum. Because as soon as his name comes into the picture, everything gets skewed. For better or for worse (though mostly the latter) his personality and image overtake his actual works and color what we say about them. While reading Purity I struggled to think of this as a book rather than a Franzen book. I tried to anticipate how people would react to it and whether their reactions would be valid or too thrown by the author.

With all those caveats, Purity continues Franzen's string of big novels that seem outwardly to be literary and about big-ideas and modern life and all that but are actually very readable and besides the occasional spouting of fancy literary-ness, are actually a lot more like regular old non-literary fiction than many would like to admit.

Yes, there are things in here that make it very difficult to forget that it's Franzen. I suspect many women who read the book will start the first section and feel the same squeamishness I did knowing that Franzen is writing about an attractive and damaged young woman. At times the parts of the book about Pip ring slightly false so that you'd suspect a middle-aged male is the author, but at many other times they ring sharp and true. And this is why I continue to read Franzen. Because sometimes he writes a sentence or a paragraph that breaks the skin and slices deep.

The novel is about secrets, inspired by a Julian Assange-like character who floats through the center of the book along with a few other connected characters. What we share about ourselves and what we don't. I don't know if it's Franzen's best, the pivotal character of Pip's mother is that type of mostly-functionally-crazy person that I always struggle to accept in fiction because so many people are held so firmly in their orbit which seems so utterly irrational.

I suspect many people will review the book and talk about its unlikable characters. And it's true, they're mostly unlikable. (And Pip is that classic example of a young female character who doesn't actually seem to have much of a personality besides her backstory and who people are continually drawn toward for reasons no one can know.) But I like books with unlikable characters, I don't think Franzen should get a bad rap for it when we often praise women for writing books with unlikable characters. And even though Franzen does get it wrong about women sometimes, he gets it right surprisingly often. And yes, ultimately, this book that starts out feeling like it is about women ends up feeling like it was all about men after all and that frustrates me. But it's a book worth talking about, it's a book I flew through in 2 days, it's fascinating and flawed at the same time.