It’s fair to say that nobody writes a novel about a colossal, mysteriously transmitted bequest with a central character called Pip without meaning to evoke some comparisons. But Jonathan Franzen doesn’t seem to me to be a Dickensian novelist; now might be a good time to work out what sort of novelist he is.
This, and its predecessors The Corrections (2001), a family saga without the passage of time, and Freedom (2010), a crankier but more admirable novel in which environmental issues reshape personal relations, are novels of immense detail. But they are detailed in the way that Dickens could never be bothered with: about inventions, corporate workings, professional plotting and money.
They prefer, in a way characteristic of the contemporary American novel, to describe the technical specifications of a static object — the exact genus of seaweed on the beach, the precise shape of slate on the tongue and groove house — to the human gesture Dickens so valued, as characters try to protect themselves by raising their hands to the face. You will get a long way in this novel before you find an account of someone betraying a feeling through moving, in Dickens’s manner, rather than usefully performing a feeling for the sake of the narrative. (Franzen’s favourite indicator is “he sighed”, but “shrugged” is not far behind.)
They are intricate and often involving novels. The best of them, Freedom, lets its characters follow their own desires. In Purity, too, we have an interesting set of characters put through a sort of thriller plot, slowed down and given considerable impact by Franzen’s preferred gravity of analysis.
Pip, née Purity, grows up in the kind of pseudo-artistic community given to crank diets that GK Chesterton long ago skewered. “You didn’t have to write to be a poet, you didn’t have to create things to be an artist.” Her mother is tearful and needy, fending off all questions about her father; Pip does not even know his name. Pip herself has a trainwreck of a life, working in a call centre for pretend ethical-environmental projects, and living in a disastrous semi-commune. “Her schizophrenic housemate, Dreyfuss, was watching a basketball game with her disabled housemate, Ramón, on a scavenged TV set.” One night a temporary resident, a German girl, engages her in conversation, then a questionnaire, then a discussion of the work of a pioneer of internet openness.
Advertisement
Annagret, it turns out, works for Andreas Wolf. Wolf, a survivor of freedom campaigns in the old East Germany, would like to speak to her from his hideout in Bolivia, where his Assange-like Sunlight Project is based. Pip more or less sees that she is being recruited into a cult, but goes anyway. Soon it becomes apparent that Wolf has an interest in an American rival, who possesses dangerous information about Wolf, and she is unwittingly planted within the rival’s organisation.
Incidentally — or is it incidentally? — the rival appears to be connected to Pip. Could he be her father? He certainly knows a good deal about her mother, including the surprising information that she may have walked away from a family inheritance of hundreds of millions of dollars. Pip wants to find her father; her motivation is simple and pure. What the motivation of the others is, and what they know, is a matter for some speculation, driving the plot forward.
It’s a curious sensation, reading this splendid Elmore Leonard plot with the leisurely and multiplying prose of a Jonathan Franzen. It is compelling, but not taut or absorbing in the way that Freedom was. What we have in the German sections about Wolf’s youth is a good deal of solid research, but not the degree of empathy which will remove an imagination from its own circumstances.
To take one instance: at one point, Andreas visits his mother in her flat in the Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, ringing the intercom to gain admission. Those flats did have intercoms; what he can’t imagine is how extraordinary and privileged this would have seemed to the rest of the GDR. He is writing from an unexamined point of view where an intercom is normal, not where it is extraordinary. The details are good, though not flawless — I doubt Kim Philby ever had dinner with a Liverpool docker in his life — but it’s the human attitudes that ring false.
And, like this small point, his insights into the GDR in general seem constrained by the requirement to compare their society with the West, and in particular with America. Apart from a few routine “to serve the Party” asides, we have little sense of what it is like to grow up within this set of values and judge the world by them. Would an East German ever think “The Republic was heartbreakingly German in its striving to be logically consistent?” In the end, when Franzen ventures outside America, he demonstrates the usual interpretation: the world wants to be American, and talks about America without cease. This is one of Franzen’s limitations as a novelist, ones of which he remains insistently, even aggressively unaware.
Advertisement
It’s a vainglorious, intricate novel, with a very strong thesis. The bold comparison of inescapable internet connectivity with the inescapable surveillance of the security services of the GDR may not stand up, but provides a beautiful basis of imagery. Pip herself is a triumph; initially maddening, the reader comes round to her every frustration and lack of personal insight. If she doesn’t change, she certainly appears to.
The novel would benefit from a ruthless haircut all over, letting it get to the point at a tempo that might suit its plot, and from a modest acceptance from this exceedingly American writer that he’s not at his best when imagining the lives of people who have never been to America. A novel that never left Oakland would, paradoxically, have had much more global appeal.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Fourth Estate, 576pp, £20. To buy this book for £16, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Jonathan Franzen will be at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Oct 2. Cheltenhamfestivals.com