Franzen’s ‘Purity’ is modeled on Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 563 pages, $28)

Having won the National Book Award in 2001 for his third novel, “The Corrections,” and being dubbed “the Great American Novelist” on the cover of Time, Jonathan Franzen is about as well-known as a literary writer can be today.

Now comes “Purity,” his fifth novel (following “Freedom” in 2010), which is garnering lots of attention.

While Franzen has long been known for his craft and intelligence, his last three novels reveal him as a top-rate comic novelist. One example from his new novel occurs when Charles Blenheim, a promising novelist whose overblown second novel is trashed by reviewers lashes out about the “plague of literary Jonathans” that dominate the New York Times Book Review.

Able to laugh at himself, if obliquely, Franzen turns his incisive prose on larger prey, such as the United States, “a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture.”

But he’s much more than a comic novelist. He writes characters that are both sympathetic and achingly flawed. And while plot is not a major part of his writing, he tells an engaging story, tying together various plot elements and bringing some resolution to his many characters’ dilemmas.

The titular character of “Purity” is a young woman who goes by Pip. And if you immediately think of Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” you’re expected to. Franzen makes more than one reference to it.

He follows Dickens in other ways as well, giving Purity a monstrous, crazy mother, loading down Pip with the great expectations of others, creating coincidences and melodramatic plot twists, including a mystery about who Pip’s father is.

While Pip is the main character, Franzen tells long stories of other characters who impinge on her life. She is hired, out of the blue, it seems, by Andreas Wolf, an Internet guru famous for leaking secrets, and goes to work for him at his hideaway in the forests of Bolivia.

We learn about Wolf’s life in East Germany, avoiding the tentacles of the Stasi (secret police) and falling in love with a troubled girl named Annagret, who feels threatened by her stepfather.

We meet Tom Aberant and Anabel McCaskill, whose tumultuous relationship leads to marriage, then divorce.

Beyond telling a story with arresting if at times overdrawn characters, Franzen often reflects the tenor of the times. “Purity” addresses the current end of privacy in an age of ubiquitous social media.

Andreas Wolf reflects on how the Internet has come to signify death to him, glimpsing it in online porn: “Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response.”

Franzen is adept at introducing such social commentary through characters’ thoughts. Early on, Pip notes how her dealings with her mother “were all tainted by ‘moral hazard,’ a useful phrase she’d learned in economics. She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail, an employee too indispensable to be fired for bad attitude.”

However, Franzen’s satiric bent often impinges on the realistic feel of his scenes, and his characters’ actions are too over-the-top. He even describes one character speaking with “fairy-tale cruelty.”

And he goes on too long with certain characters and their repeated conflicts, to the point of growing tired of them. I’m thinking of Tom and Anabel.

On occasion, Franzen also gets carried away with his vocabulary: “a penumbra of inurement to death,” “sexually botherated.”

And local readers will catch his misrepresentation of Wichita, where Anabel’s father’s headquarters are. He mentions “the city’s slummy east side.” What?

The book ends strongly, with the focus back on Pip. And the final image of rain brings to mind the snow in James Joyce’s famous story “The Dead.”

“Purity” is a long, engrossing novel with plenty to entertain a reader. Like Dickens, he develops many characters and comments on our social milieu. But he does so with more humor – and perhaps less hubris – than the great 19th-century novelist.

This story was originally published October 21, 2015 at 9:43 PM with the headline "Franzen’s ‘Purity’ is modeled on Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’."