JONATHAN FRANZEN Purity. Reviewed by Michael Richardson
This novel might be the most sustained, thoughtful interrogation of secrecy and exposure in the digital age.
Jonathan Franzen has become one of those rare literary authors whose public persona casts a shadow over his works. After famously refusing to appear on Oprah’s show to promote his 2001 breakout novel The Corrections, he did exactly that for Freedom in 2010. Franzen has launched jeremiads against social media, declared his inability to understand young people, and told one interviewer that only his editor’s intervention had dissuaded him from of adopting an Iraqi child to address that lack. There is something carefully cultivated about all this; the desire to not simply be curmudgeonly, out of touch and elitist, but to be known for it.
Yet the irony is that Franzen’s writing is eminently accessible, managing to be both literary and popular. Franzen can write prose that sings, that weaves unforgettable characters with a light yet sincere touch. The joy of The Corrections lies in each of the members of the beautifully flawed Lambert family, not the book’s insights into the dire straits of late capitalism. So too Freedom, which in its most moving moments captures something similar: a family uncertain before the roaring world yet determined to live full lives within it. Grand themes of the modern age – globalisation, war, environmental destruction – become the felt realities of his characters rather than abstract concepts.
Purity sees Franzen again desperately grappling with a changing world, but with more unease and less charity for the lived experience of the four figures at the heart of the novel. Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler drifts in a post-college narcissistic haze of student debt, infatuation and great expectations. Andreas Wolf, a beautiful, charismatic and even more problematic Julian Assange character, struggles with the secrets of his past while exposing those of celebrities, corporations and governments. Investigative reporter Leila Helou desperately wants what she can’t have – children and a family of her own – while her editor and lover Tom Aberrant remains haunted by his first wife, the mysteriously vanished billionaire heiress Anabel Laird. Yet in this unfolding story of loyalty, murder and secrecy, none of them escape beyond the page in quite the same way the Lamberts so vividly do, nor even the Berglunds of Freedom.
At first glance this is a novel about Pip: she shares a name with the title, focalises three of the seven chapters, and is the figure that tugs the narrative through its exposure of various secrets. Yet Pip is weakly drawn, as if Franzen were not quite sure what should make her tick. In the 70-odd pages that open the novel, her character consists of millennial clichés: she’s self-involved, lacking in practical skills, bored by her job, desperate to do something if only it won’t actually involve her, you know, doing anything. After her advances on her married and callow activist housemate are rebuffed, she reverts to stereotype:
Pip couldn’t leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame.
While she treats her other housemates kindly – one intellectually disabled and the other schizophrenic – her energies are otherwise devoted to phone calls with her mother and plotting the discovery of her father’s identity. Not, it should be emphasised, out of any filial desire, but because she thinks he might be able to pay down her debts.
Purity isn’t really about Pip, however. Her agency in the novel is deceptively small. Her purpose is to advance the plot. First, she is led to Andreas and his Sunlight Project (very carefully not Wikileaks), then to Tom and his online journalism start-up, Denver Independent. The two men are the poles between which the text moves, men both different and similar, each with fraught pasts that threaten to unravel their presents. Disgraced son of senior East German figures, Andreas stumbles into dissident stardom while attempting to obtain his own Stasi files after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By then he is already entangled with the beautiful Anagret, whose plight leads him to violence. While there is a cartoonish quality to his messianic style – a remote Bolivian lair, a coterie of nerd hackers and hot female acolytes, an affair with the movie star playing his mother in a biopic – Andreas’s self-involvement nonetheless plumbs depths, rather than dipping into the surface like Pip’s. Here he is, telling her about secrets:
Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness.
This problem of whom to reveal the inside to haunts Andreas; his ceaseless exposure of secrets over the decades that follow disguises his own dark past. Pip herself is a kind of secret, not that she knows it for much of the book.
Tom, too, is given the complexity that Pip lacks. Where her obsessions are mundane, his are complex and forensically examined. In a first-person ‘memoir’ that begins two-thirds of the way into the book, Tom tells the story of meeting, marrying and divorcing Anabel, the daughter of a billionaire who refuses her inheritance. Troubled yet beguiling in her strangeness and force of personality, Anabel proves dangerously addictive. From the vantage point of the present, Tom testifies to the follies of his youth and the errors of his marriage with a sustained sympathy and lack of regret:
We seldom actually fought or argued; it was more often a matter of processing endlessly, what I or someone else had done to make her feel bad. My entire personality reorganised itself in defense of her tranquillity and defense of myself from her reproach. It’s possible to describe this as an emasculation of me, but it was really more like a dissolution of the boundaries of our selves.
The purity of his love hurts, but not for the world would he let go what he had for an end to the pain. Anabel’s character drifts into farce, but Tom’s dangerous devotion to her does not. Franzen is at his finest here, giving an engrossing account of self-aware yet inescapable recklessness.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for his writing of Pip, or the reporter Leila, whose point-of-view chapter bobs into sight in the first half but leaves few ripples as the narrative unfolds. Perhaps this is because she is hardly the star of her own narrative. Her novelist husband Charles, crippled in a drunken car-crash, unable to recapture the glory of his debut masterpiece, seems to be the character Franzen really wants to write. Nor are Pip, Leila and Anabel the only women to receive short shrift: mothers are at fault everywhere, women lead men into dark and at times violent places, and young, beautiful females always fall over themselves to please middle-aged dudes. To readers of Franzen, this will hardly be new, although The Corrections spared its women more than either of the later novels.
Nor is it reason to dismiss the book out of hand. Franzen can write, and the novel might be the most sustained, thoughtful interrogation of secrecy and exposure in the digital age; certainly, it will be the most widely read. Every secret has power, all power is predicated on secrets; what does it mean, then, to threaten the very capacity of secrecy itself? Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are fascinating figures for this reason: they threaten not only to shape the power of states, but to expose the fragility of secrets everywhere. In different ways, each of Purity’s characters embodies and engages secrets. How those secrets – murderous, familial, political, marital – unravel, and the price paid for both secrecy and exposure, give the novel its gravity.
To say more about secrets would be to reveal too much of the plot, and it is the plot’s unfolding, expertly handled by Franzen, that offers the novel’s greatest pleasure. Some occasionally clunky shifts in temporality notwithstanding, the narrative builds remarkable tension while ranging across decades and continents. As the connections between nodes in the network become visible, the suspense mounts, drama ensues, irrevocable events occur.
Countless elegant resonances bind this narrative in large and small ways, but a vibrant and finely crafted narrative is not enough to lift this novel to the heights of The Corrections. None of Purity’s characters are alive enough to be missed when the book arrives at its surprisingly quiet close. Their purity leads them to a place altogether too bare, too unfulfilling. That may well be the point: fanaticism alienates. But the redemptions are too meagre, too fleeting. If there is so little light with which youthful passion might brighten the future, why obsess over the present at all?
Jonathan Franzen Purity Fourth Estate 2015 PB 576pp $32.99
Michael Richardson is an academic and writer. Once, he was the only Australian speechwriter in Canadian politics. He can be found on the web at www.marichardson.net and on Twitter @richardson_m_a.
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