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Themes And Bodies Collide In Franzen’s Newest Novel, Purity
Jonathan Franzen begins this novel, his latest, with bodies. In the very first scene, Anabel’s eyelid is twitching, or she thinks it is; so she says to her overwrought daughter, Pip Tyler, who is working as an “outreach specialist” for an energy company. Pip, whose full name is Purity, is used to the troubles of her mother’s body. As the only child of this reclusive woman, she has heard them all before. Yet, while Anabel is forthcoming about her ailments, she refuses to tell Pip anything about her father or even her real birthday.
Pip is $130,000 in debt, living in a house with disaffected Occupy protesters, and working as a glorified telemarketer. Her desperation propels her into an internship in Bolivia with the Sunlight Project, a group that traffics in secrets, run by the charismatic, Julian Assange–like character Andreas Wolf.
In Bolivia, Pip is ensnared by Wolf’s cult of personality, fame, and mental illness. While she seeks to uncover the secrets of her own life, she allows herself to be used by Wolf to exact revenge on a man he believes will expose his own dark secrets.
Like Franzen’s previous novels Freedom and The Corrections, Purity is about complicated and combusting families, and people trapped by the systems they create: fame, socialism, moral hegemony, marriage, guilt, and the internet. In this book, with its nod to Great Expectations, Franzen addresses the corrupting power of fame and money and the inheritance of a broken world.
Themes and bodies collide in Franzen’s complicated narrative, which is strewn with murder, sex, and heiresses. As in his previous novels, Franzen combines digressions and literary polish with the narrative tautness of a thriller novel. The scene in which Pip is interviewed for her internship would almost seem expository if it weren’t for the tension created by Pip’s boyfriend waiting naked for her up in her room.
But at its core, Purity is preoccupied with the body. The characters are stymied by their own disabilities, mental illnesses, and corrupt desires. Wolf is attracted to underage girls and uses his position of authority to have sex with them. Pip, conversely, tries and fails to seduce her housemate, a much older man. The characters try to overcome the lusts, loves, and limitations of their own sick bodies, but they cannot. Not even money or the internet can save them.
Though women are key to the story, they remain vague, because they are rarely seen. The words “pretty,” “lovely,” and “beautiful” occur so many time next to descriptions of women that I started keeping a running tally. In truth, those words aren’t so much descriptions as they are judgment calls, obscuring the reader’s view and moving the gaze from character to conclusions.
The exception is Anabel, who emerges as real over 500 pages because of her daughter’s tender gaze and her own relentless obsession with her body. At one point, Anabel even attempts to grid each inch of her skin and film it. She becomes tired of this project, and her husband at the time remarks, “‘I now see that she must have quickly become bored with the surface of her body—there’s a reason we go through life without paying much attention to it—but to her it felt as if the world were out to thwart her.'”
By the end, we can see her, her snow-drift curves, her gap-toothed smile and thin, aging hands, while the book’s other women remain somewhat obscured. Meanwhile, the men of Purity stand in sharp relief: Tom Aberant with his bald head and staunchly out-of-style glasses, Wolf with his tight jeans and careless blonde hair. Even thin Jason, Pip’s love interest who appears at the beginning and end of the book, is drawn carefully. The irony is that Franzen’s thesis seems to elevate the connection of bodies over the connections made through computers. Facebook, Twitter, and virtual porn leave his characters feeling isolated. It’s the intersections of bodies and collisions of physical desire where characters find connection and redemption.
Purity is a complicated novel of relationships and systems gone awry, and it’s worth reading for its unconstrained digression and footloose plots, not to mention the sly nods to other writers, dirty acrostics, and literary jokes about lengthy books. Like Freedom and The Corrections, it’s a complicated family tale of inheritance, time, and connections, however we find them. In the end, Franzen ends his book the way he began, with bodies—hands holding, people fighting, sex in the back seat of a Zipcar—struggling to make any sort of connection.