A Dickensian twist

In his dynamic new novel, Jonathan Franzen draws a funny portrait of a writer struggling to write a novel “that would secure him his place in the modern American canon.” “Once upon a time,” this writer named Charles thinks, “it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.”

Franzen, of course, is famous for having written two big novels, The Corrections and Freedom, that gave readers big, wide-angled lenses on US middle-class life at the turn of the millennium and helped cement his reputation as one of his generation’s most gifted writers.

His latest novel, Purity, is also big in terms of thickness and length, but it’s less panoramic in its ambitions. Although its gripping, foot-on-the-gas plot touches on the fall of the Berlin Wall, stolen Stasi files and a missing thermonuclear warhead in Texas, the novel remains closely focused on the stories of its main characters — a young California woman named Pip who is looking for her father, and a Julian Assange-like figure who is eager to get Pip to work for him in South America. These people’s efforts to sort out their identities and come to terms with the tangled mess of their private lives stand at the heart of what is Franzen’s most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet.

The stories of the characters in Purity zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Franzen’s determination to build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence — and to allow himself to feel something like sympathy for them.

Certainly, there are plenty of aggrieved characters in Purity sporting noxious traits familiar from people in earlier Franzen books — industrial-strength anger and high-octane envy, coupled with lots of passive-aggressive narcissism and self-pity. And the opening pages of the novel, which introduce Purity (or Pip, as she calls herself), depressingly suggest that we’re going to be stuck with a “snarky little twerp” of a heroine, who brings out her creator’s worst proclivities toward condescension. It’s unclear whether Franzen means Pip to initially be so obnoxious — perhaps as a way of subverting tropes of the bildungsroman, or as an act of self-satire. Or whether he’s simply finding his sea legs, relying on old default settings of sarcasm before finding a new and compelling groove.

Happily for the reader, the book quickly picks up speed and nuance, and Pip and the novel’s other major characters soon emerge as knotty, complicated people who compel our attention. Pip, who feels suffocated by her needy, reclusive mother and who’s reeling from a humiliating sexual encounter, sets off, like Telemachus, in search of her mysterious and absent father. Andreas Wolf, an East German provocateur and seducer of young women, who is running from the authorities, transforms himself into the head of a WikiLeaks-type organisation, winning worldwide notoriety and fame. Tom Aberant, who met Andreas years ago in Germany and knows his worst secrets, uses money from his estranged wife’s wealthy father to start an investigative news service. And Leila Helou, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in hot pursuit of a big scoop, finds herself torn between two men — her true love, Tom, and her disabled husband, Charles, the aforementioned writer intent on writing the big book; Leila will take Pip under her wing as a protégée and kind of surrogate daughter.

Franzen adroitly dovetails these storylines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain. After its somewhat stilted start, the novel kicks into gear, with Franzen writing with gathering assurance and verve. Despite Pip’s name and the mystery surrounding her paternity, Purity uses Dickens and Great Expectations as a touchstone only in so much as it invokes an array of classics. The emotionally tactile account of Tom’s miserable marriage and divorce from a tempestuous and self-absorbed woman named Anabel recalls Bellow’s Herzog, while the caustic descriptions of Andreas’ existential dance with sex and death can feel like Dostoyevsky poured through a comic US filter.

In Purity, Franzen demonstrates his ease at conjuring whole worlds with a couple taps on the keyboard — be it the Bolivian jungle where Andreas is hiding out, populated with “Dr Seuss birds, huge guans that clambered in fruit trees;” or San Francisco, where fog spills from the hills like “a thing you saw coming,” a “season on the move.”

Instead of clumsily hammering home the novel’s theme of purity, Franzen allows it to grow organically out of his myriad storylines. And instead of patronising his characters as he has sometimes done in the past, he shows a heightened ability to portray them from within, as they struggle with a tumult of emotions: They seem less like Freudian victims whose fates have already been determined by dysfunctional family pasts, than free agents with at least some say in choosing their destinies.

Franzen has added a new octave to his voice. Readers are likely to appreciate his ability here to not just satirise the darkest and pettiest of human impulses but to also capture his characters’ yearnings for connection and fresh starts.