The publication of a new Jonathan Franzen novel has a lot in common with the release of a new iPhone: Both early-autumn events are greeted with absurd amounts of anticipation, excitement, and derision, along with much commentary, and analysis of the commentary, etc. To be sure, there are other important novelists working today, and likewise various sorts of whiz-bang smartphones, but only Franzen and the iPhone dominate conversations in this manner, and with good reason: In both cases, even when a new release really doesn’t represent a dramatic advance on its hallowed predecessors, it’s still pretty impressive.
Following on Franzen’s most recent novels, The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010), funny and very smart both, Purity reads like the work of a major writer who’s become a little too practiced at his bravura storytelling. Once more, Franzen has worked up a sprawling novel that’s impressively of-the-moment in its political and cultural referents and storylines, while also keenly attuned to the stormy relationships, interior lives, and self-understandings of the people living through the intensities of that moment. “She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail,” Franzen tells us on the opening page of the novel, introducing the novel’s namesake protagonist, Purity “Pip” Tyler. Franzen’s distinctive gift is to take a universal situation — a young woman’s just making her way into the wider world and already done in by the demands of her parent — and make it feel fresh and immediate by drawing on a very current vernacular to express the character’s difficulties, while also making fun of the character’s grandiose self-dramatizing.
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