Purity ‘Pip’ Tyler is a girl like so many others. It’s 2015, the market has only just begun to convalesce, and she is stuck in a dead-end job with crippling student debt. She is terrible at interpersonal relationships, has managed to alienate most of her friends: she feels like – and for all accounts is – a failure. Her needy mother has never told her who her father is. But then Pip meets Andreas Wolf, Man Who Is Totally Not Julian Assange, and he offers to help her find her father. But why? At what cost?
Reviews are all about the reader’s opinion, so let me state unequivocally that I really fucking hated this book. I know it got great reviews, and I can recognise the points they highlight. I’m not typically someone who goes against the grain there, but I’ll make an exception for this book.
The main problem is that all the characters are bloody exhausting. The women behave erratically. The men are slaves to the women’s emotions. There is a lot of talk about anal sex and being writerly, being important, the human fucking condition. Halfway through, one of the characters asks someone how they feel about contemporary writers, like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, then casually remarks that “there are entirely too many Jonathans” on the literary scene. I guess Franzen and I can at least concur on that one.
I read The Corrections many, many years ago and I remember liking it, but back then it still seemed fresh. Then I read Freedom, which seemed like the same book but worse. Purity is a little different in that it doesn’t have that traditional family structure, and similar in that it has much of the same black, bleak humour, and I’m sure it is very funny, but it completely missed the mark for me. Instead of wryly funny it just seems like undiluted misanthropy.
One accusation frequently levelled at Franzen is that his work has a sexist edge, and that seems fairly obvious here. The women are shrill harpies, wily in their emotions and stingy with sex, stringing the men along with their irrational follies and their oedipal vaginas (the mothers, in this book, are without fail, the stuff of Greek tragedies). Not that the men fare much better; they’re egocentric, think they’re the centre of the universe or the saviour of mankind. They extensively ponder the nature of the world around them, of interpersonal relationships. They’re also slaves to the women. I guess it’s meant to be funny, but I thought it was fucking exhausting. I skipped through the last few chapters; it’s a pretty hefty book.
Is this a bad book? Probably not. I was never bored enough to stop reading entirely, and I was never entertained enough to really want to keep going. I stuck with it and I really wish I hadn’t. There is some redemption for the characters at the end, but by then I was just worn out by their constant bickering, doubting and muck-raking.
Good books will make you feel something, and in that sense the novel worked. I just wish the overwhelming feeling it left me with wasn’t a deep, existential exhaustion.