Jonathan Franzen’s most recent novel is, like its enormously successful predecessors The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010), a big, inventive and exuberant book about the mores, and the modes of engagement, of contemporary culture. It tells the story of “Pip” Tyler (birth name Purity), a recent college graduate who lives in a squat in Oakland with a group of radical activists whose various causes include a desire to do away with money. Only Pip, whose debt from college runs to a terrifying $130,000, works for a living.
Pip also has to manage her mother Anabel, an emotionally demanding and hypochondriac hippie who believes that her life is “nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal”. Anabel is unwilling or unable to help alleviate the burden of Pip’s financial difficulties and refuses to reveal to Pip the identity of her father. Pip, of course, wants to find out – not least because she hopes he will be able to free her from the grip of debt.
As Pip is about to embark on the search for her father, a beautiful German woman she lives with offers to secure her an internship with a WikiLeaks-type organisation run by a Julian Assange-type figure named Andreas Wolf, who might be able to help her solve the twin problems of her insolvency and her identity. With all of this in place, Franzen introduces a clutch of related narratives that transport us to a variety of places – among them East Berlin and the Bolivian rainforest.
The resulting novel is vast, rambling, entertaining and funny. Pip’s mother is vividly and memorably realised, and Franzen has a gift for capturing the tics that characterise different patterns of speech. But when he is not writing dialogue, the conceits he deploys in his prose can occasionally feel strained and imprecise – as demonstrated by some of the more preposterous plot twists and the novel’s rather broad, and sometimes clumsy, satire. That said, this is a book in which there is much to admire and more to enjoy.
Purity is published by 4th Estate (£8.99). Click here to order a copy for £7.37
