Review: Jonathan Franzen’s Purity grapples with the Internet and isolation
It’ll definitely make you think.
Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, opens on Purity “Pip’’ Tyler, a 23-year-old living with anarchists in Oakland, chronically under-performing at a job she hates. She is the picture of the unmoored millennial.
She’s cynical and highly intelligent, self-serving and socially withdrawn. Her mother suffers from depression, and won’t tell Pip anything about the father she’s never known (from whom she’s trying to extract money to pay student debt).
Soon we meet Annagret, a German woman who lives in Pip’s squat house. She offers Pip a solution to her problems in the form of an internship. She connects Pip with Andreas Wolf, the Julian Assange-esque man famed for his “truth-telling’’ Sunlight Project, a Bolivia-based company whose mission is to shed light on the dark corners of the Internet and the world.
Intrigued that the Sunlight Project can help her find her father—and his checkbook—Pip decides to see what Andreas has to offer.
Before Pip boards a plane or even applies for a visa, the novel veers back in time and around the world, orienting the reader in Cold War East Germany. Here, Andreas’s earlier years unfold. (If reading the text anachronistically doesn’t phase you, you can read the section, called “The Republic of Bad Taste,’’ excerpted by the New Yorker).
The following section of the book leaps farther forward, at which point the reader meets Leila, a journalist navigating a tricky relationship dynamic and a pressure-filled career. Her boss, Tom, has been her lover for the past decade while her husband, Charles, sits at home in a wheelchair. As Leila—with the help of her research assistant Pip—tries to break a huge story, personal pressures come to a boiling point.
The novel swings back in time to Pip’s time in South America before regressing even further to the early courtship between Tom and his first wife, Anabel Laird.
If the other characters are manipulative and hypocritical, Anabel may be the most self-contradictory. Though she’s first introduced as a sort of mythical heartbreaker by Tom and Leila, we meet Anabel in her days as a student. A domineering feminist, she’s an heiress who abhors her fortune and a filmmaker-activist on campus.
Broadly, the novel grapples with secrets, information, a murder, and love. It speculates on the ineludible nature of the past and society’s innavigable future. Like any Franzen novel, it’s laden with intricate subplots, steering the narrative down so many winding side streets that you aren’t sure where the main road is anymore.
Franzen swaps out Freedom’s chronicling of the environmental movement for the inner workings of the German Stasi and the mechanisms of the World Wide Web. These information dumps feel thoroughly researched and highly interesting—if not always strictly necessary.
In spite of these sidelines and the careening plot, Purity’s not hard to follow. The characters’ connections are tenuous at times, but the ride is thoroughly enjoyable. And it doesn’t hurt that Franzen demarcates each large section with a blank page and a bold title.
The novel hones in on loneliness; all of the characters yearn for something to believe in and strive (often fruitlessly) to be understood. Franzen’s personal wariness of technology comes across, not in villainizing the Internet, but by leading the characters to the edge of their thoughts and asking whether infinite accessibility has ultimately isolated us all.
Though the mood can feel melancholy, there are many moments of humor; the characters are steeped in self-deprecation. Their contradictions make them so relatable that we sometimes feel damned right alongside them.
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