Book Review: Secrets and control lie at the core of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity

Ignore the frenzy surrounding American writer Jonathan Franzen, as his latest novel is quite possibly his greatest.

Purity is American author Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel. Geoff Pugh / REX Shutterstock

An unexpected thing happened a quarter of the way through my reading of Jonathan Franzen's fifth novel, Purity – I stopped taking notes, underlining sentences, or scribbling in the margins. The other thing I stopped doing was caring about the public figure/straw dog known as Jonathan Franzen.

Is Franzen unkind about Twitter? Why isn't Franzen promoting himself on Facebook? Was he deserving of being on the cover of Time magazine? Should a white male novelist even be on the cover of Time magazine when certain self-obsessed white female romance novelists aren't? Is that fair? What about his still fairly lustrous hair? And is Franzen really so special that we have to discuss the fact that he really, really likes bird watching?

Franzen’s fame does his work a disservice. Here’s the only thing you need to know: Jonathan Franzen is a famous, 56-year-old American novelist and his latest novel may be his best.

Purity is a novel not so much about the internet, as some would like to see it, but a dizzyingly human book about secrets and the systems we create, both personal and public, for keeping secrets – and controlling others with them.

It’s a book about the messiness of human interaction on the small scale – his dissection of failing relationships and child-parent dichotomies are harrowing, to say the least – and the large scale: much of the novel takes place in communist East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel encompasses murder and contemporary musings on journalism, communism, internet culture and feminism.

It is propelled by frankly absurd (if incredibly tasty), novelistic coincidences. It even has an unclaimed fortune. To say it doesn't shy away from wide­screen 19th-century storytelling would be an understatement. In fact, in a certain light, it's a story that could be a bizarre and very knowing update on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

So it's no surprise that the first protagonist we meet, Purity Tyler, goes by the name of Pip – also the hero of Great Expectations. When we first meet Pip, she's suffocating under a mountain of college debt, living in a San Francisco squat and working as a community organiser. She's a striking creation: suffering from sometimes hilarious impulse-control problems, a general lack of direction and unable to move forward in her life because of her co-dependent mother.

Pip’s mother, who we’ll meet later in the novel as a young woman, lives completely off- grid up in the mountains, strapping Pip to her in a destructive dance of control and need. “No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched.” She’s a fearful, disturbed hoarder of secrets – including her own identity and the identity of Pip’s father – that will eventually explode Pip’s life and the novel.

Into Pip’s life one day come the Germans and a man named Andreas Wolf, a famous former East German dissident and on-the-run leaker (a deceptively “pure” version of Julian Assange), founder of the Sunlight Project, with his own secrets and reasons for offering Pip an internship in his Bolivian compound. From there the novel takes off in thrilling, unexpected ways.

We’re taken to an entirely convincing East Berlin of the 1980s, charting the life of Andreas Wolf to Bolivia with Pip, and to Denver, where we meet Tom Aberant, the novel’s third protagonist, an old-fashioned watchdog journalist seemingly unconnected to and at odds with Wolf’s Sunlight Project. But all through these plot machinations are trapped brutally real characters, often clawing at themselves and each other. The height of the drama coming from excerpts from Aberant’s memoir, charting the progressively more unhinged relationship he had with his ex-wife, one of the best explorations of the insanity and destruction love can wreak on a couple.

It’s a testament to the novel that Franzen presents these secret-­poisoned, destructive relationships from all sides. He shows how love and family can sometimes be stronger than our worst selves and all we do to corrode those bonds.

Tod Wodicka’s second novel The Household Spirit was published this year by Jonathan Cape.