Here the connections emerge slowly, with the help of an elaborate plot that is chilling in its implications. In “The Corrections,” because it was the story of one family, each perspective had a natural connection with the ones that came before and after. The structure follows the same system as Franzen’s earlier books “The Corrections” and “Freedom.” A character is given a chunk of pages and many scenes, then allowed to disappear, replaced by another character, only to re-emerge later. This sense of a confused identity feeds into her general confusion, and the growing sense for the reader that she is as much a pawn as a personality. Pip’s main complaint as the novel opens is that her mother will not tell her who her father is, or indeed what her mother’s real name is. Or so it seems for the first half, before the very weaknesses in her personality become essential to the novel’s progress and the reader’s interest. She can feel bad about herself and the world, she can be feisty, but her sensibility is not rich enough and she is too passive to make her the main character in a novel of this length. She seems surprised and becomes angry when she finds a text he sends to another guy: “U can have her # if you have a taste for weird.”Īs Pip moves in and out of the book it may be that she is not weird enough it appears at first that she does not have sufficient substance to hold the narrative. When Pip meets a nice boy in a coffee shop, a guy who seems to like her, she leaves him alone in her bedroom in a state of some sexual arousal and stays away for more than an hour while she fills in a questionnaire for a friend downstairs. Pip’s general situation in a dead-end job is not helped by her obsession with a married man who lives with his wife in the same house in Oakland as Pip and some others. Pip is burdened by college debt, a lack of direction and a sharp intelligence she is also burdened by her mother, who has brought Pip up alone in a tiny cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains and now works at the checkout in a market. At the center of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Purity,” is a young college graduate called Pip, whose full first name, bestowed by her not-quite-sane mother, is Purity.

Purity jonathan franzen review