- FSG
- PURITY: Roxane Gay has rightly described it as “full of contempt for the reader.”
“WOMEN, AM I RIGHT?” That’s the cool new margin note I had to invent while struggling through Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity. I wrote it over and over again while I read Franzen’s dull, long-winded prose, the only thing propelling me forward being the knowledge that perhaps my suffering could prevent others from getting tangled up in the same chore.
Well, let’s dive in! Purity is so named for Franzen’s protagonist, a smart but feckless millennial invented by someone who has clearly never been a young woman in her twenties. Purity—who prefers the nickname Pip, lest we forget for a moment that this is a riff on Dickens—is contacted by Julian Assange and invited to work for WikiLeaks, basically, except in Purity, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have different names (Andreas Wolf and the Sunlight Project, which I wish could’ve simply remained an excellent band name). Also there’s a journalist couple (Leila and Tom), an evil mother, another evil mother, and an evil ex-wife, who is maybe also one of the evil mothers (women, am I right?). Franzen faces his fear of computers through fiction, he attempts a joke about literature’s “plague of Jonathans” that doesn’t land, there’s some coercive (badly written) sex, and a lot of dashed-off exposition (“the private fiber-optic line that Andreas had obtained in a deal to upgrade Bolivian army comms,” ALL RIGHT SURE I GUESS).
Franzen makes two fatal assumptions in Purity: The first is that he understands young people (he considered adopting an Iraqi orphan to beef up his knowledge of the youths). He seems to harbor a queasy combination of scorn for and attraction to Generation Y (Purity is full of asides that sound a lot like, “Oh, you kids!” This doesn’t stop Franzen from devoting no shortage of his signature bad sex writing to an implausible affair between Pip and fake Julian Assange.)
The second fatal assumption is that he understands feminism (or possibly just women).
Hmmm.. the more this book is attacked here, and it seems often of late, the more it intrigues me to read it.
The lesson of Over-Stressing your point comes to mind, much like the street preacher I saw the other day.