Purity, like its predecessors The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010), is a Big Book not only physically but in the scope of its ambitions — a densely plotted drama that takes in a wide range of characters from internet tycoons to Californian dropouts, and ranges in place and time from contemporary North and South America to communist East Berlin before and during the fall of the Wall.
Like its predecessors, it interweaves private family dramas with big public issues (in The Corrections there was the fragility of the 1990s economic boom; in Freedom, the prospect of environmental catastrophe and the Iraq war), but to this mix is added a suggestion of the airport thriller that represents a new note in Franzen’s work. Superbly readable, with many vividly memorable scenes and characters, it is the work of a novelist at the height of his powers; but at the same time, it is a novel that raises some interesting questions about what — ultimately, and in this day and age — novels are for.
Franzen himself invites this grand perspective. He laid out his ambitions in an oft-cited 1996 essay for Harper’s Magazine, Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels, in which he lamented the fragmentation of fiction into ethnic and gender categories, and also the social irrelevance of postmodernist experimentation. The answer, according to Franzen, was a return to the kind of all-encompassing view, taking in private experience and public context, that had characterised the novel in its 19th-century heyday, the era of Dickens and Tolstoy. It was a recipe he followed with great success in his subsequent two novels, chronicling America’s changing zeitgeist through the prism of two turbulently unhappy families — the Lamberts in The Corrections and the Berglunds in Freedom.
So how does Purity measure up to these standards? The first thing to say is that the skills that have justly placed Franzen in the top rank of American writers are abundantly evident. His greatest strengths have always lain in the depth and acuity of his characterisations, and his ability to set those characters in a rich and dynamic context of familial or romantic conflict. Purity opens with just such a canvas, as we meet Pip Tyler, a poverty-stricken college grad living in a household of alternative-lifestyle itinerants in Oakland, California and working for a dodgy renewable-energy company.
Pip’s dysfunctional relationship with her wildly eccentric and excessively doting single mother (whose peculiarities include refusing to tell Pip the identity of her absent father), as well as her kamikaze approach to romantic entanglements (epitomised in a memorably excruciating scene where she throws herself at an unwilling father figure), are laid out with Franzen’s customary flair, precision and subtle humour.
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The biggest difference between Purity and its predecessors is the greater role given to intricate plotting. This feature first makes itself felt with the presence in the Oakland household of a German political-activist couple, one of whom, the beautiful and solemn Annagret, invites Pip to join something called the Sunlight Project, a secretive WikiLeaks-like campaigning organisation that harnesses the power of the internet to shine light on the darkest secrets (especially sexual) of the rich and powerful. (Consciously or not, the imagery echoes Franzen’s impassioned rhetoric in that 1996 essay, where he exhorts novelists “to represent the world not simply in its detail but in its essence, to shine a light on the blind moral eye at the heart of the virtual whirlwind”.) Secrets, hypocrisy and the liberating tyranny of the networked world — these, then, are the Big Themes bound together by Purity’s tight plotting.
With the exception of a brief Lithuanian episode in The Corrections, Franzen’s previous novels have focused on America; in Purity, he extends his reach again, for the Julian Assange-like founder of the Sunlight Project is a former East German dissident called Andreas Wolf. In the second part of the book we jump back to Wolf’s youth in communist East Berlin for a story of murder and parent-child betrayal (a theme that was to the fore in Freedom). In many ways this is the most powerful passage in the novel, not just for its evocation of time and place, but for the twisted relationship between the adolescent Wolf (a dark cocktail of moral puritanism and sexual obsession) and his coldly manipulative literary-academic mother.
This second section (The Republic of Bad Taste) ends abruptly, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Wolf, who by happenstance has been anointed a figurehead of the dissident movement by the western press, on his way to a meeting with Tom Aberant, an American journalist. The plot then tightens with two episodes that link Aberant and Wolf to Pip: first we see Pip arrive in Aberant’s life in present-day Denver (where he has become the head of an online investigative news service), and then we learn, retrospectively, how Pip had been secretly sent there by Wolf from the Sunlight Project’s hideout in Bolivia. (You may be getting an idea by now of the intricacy of the plotting.) Wolf in his jungle lair, the oversexed antihero surrounded by adoring female acolytes, is perhaps the closest Franzen comes in this novel to crossing the line into James-Bond territory.
In all the talk of state-of-the-nation themes in Franzen’s work, it is sometimes forgotten that he can be a funny writer, and nowhere more so than in his acrid portraits of doomed but unending relationships. In the next section, with another flashback, we meet (but not for the first time) perhaps the most touching character in the novel — Tom’s unwillingly super-wealthy, arty, high-maintenance wife (and then ex-wife) Anabel. Even by Franzen’s high standards, the love-hate bonding of Tom and Anabel (an endlessly looped, slow-motion car crash of emotional sadomasochism) is an exemplary exercise in what Vladimir Nabokov once referred to as “laughter in the dark”.
Even in this episode, however, the cogs of plot are whirring away in the background. They come to the fore when we finally learn what passed between Wolf and Aberant in Berlin after the Wall came down, and what it is that binds them together. This section is titled The Killer, Wolf’s name for his inner demon — and just occasionally here, as the poster boy of 21st-century enlightenment gets in touch with his dark side and starts trashing hotel rooms, Franzen risks overstepping the mark and passing from Dostoevskian to cartoonish.
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While things quickly descend into darkness for Wolf, for Pip they end sunny-side up. Not only does she discover the secret of her parentage and recover the boyfriend she had spurned in the opening section, there is also the not insignificant matter of an inheritance. At one point near the end, Pip makes a quip about “great expectations”. Along with the nickname Pip (a substitute for “Purity”, the name foisted on her by her mad mother), one can’t help feeling that this is an error of judgment on Franzen’s part. These Dickensian references merely underline a streak of contrivance in the plot. For some readers those references, and the Dickensian shape to the whole thing, will constitute a delightful homage. For others more purist about the possibilities and importance of the novel, they might betray an impurity of purpose.
It would be unfair, though, to end on that note: the sum of Purity’s parts is greater than the questionableness of the overall form into which they are cast — and besides, many readers will relish the sense of satisfaction and closure that Franzen’s taut plotting affords. This new work by an American master of realism has novelistic pleasures in abundance: characters one believes in and cares about, situations drenched in atmosphere and detail, and, above all, a propulsive current of storytelling verve.
But realism (like life itself) can take many forms, and this reader, at least, hopes that, beyond the undoubted accomplishment of Purity, Franzen will in future turn away from outworn plot structures to explore some of the other forms that ever-changing reality throws up.
Fourth Estate £20/ebook £22.50 pp563