Purity

576 pages

Published Sept. 1, 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-23921-3
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OCLC Number:
905450285

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4 stars (15 reviews)

1 edition

Review of 'Purity' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I was for some reason absolutely on board with this until about three quarters of the way through. I was confused by the praise Assange and his acolytes were heaping on the central protagonist Pip, described throughout as a genius and a legend and someone who always asks the right questions when she's just a young Californian with a lot of quippy 'I know you are but what am I?' dialogue, slightly irritated by the Freudian psychodrama around Assange at times, but not to the extent that I felt it to be a deal-breaker because I assumed that with the Great Expectations references, conservative proclamations Franzen has made on the novel, the fact that his latest series is called 'the Key to All Mythologies' that he is trying to wed passé eighteenth, nineteenth century novelistic tropes about virtue, chivalry and coincidence with a very watered-down systems-novel thing that much better …

Review of 'Purity: A Novel' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

The young people hate him. I rated his other books 5 and 4 stars and defended him from the young haters, but now, with Purity, I'm down to 3 stars. Did I change, or did he?

It's about purity--moral purity--freedom from guilt. And none of the characters manages to achieve it, though they sure try, or at least think that's what they're trying. More often, they are trying to claim the moral high ground so as to gain some advantage over someone else. The cynics in the book are aware that's what they're doing while the idealists struggle with it, fearing any advantage they might get is evidence against them.

Perhaps Franzen chose this topic to get back at his young critics whose generation's purported propensity for political correctness looks like such a quest. His view of the world is a Freudian one in which innocence is always an illusion. …

Review of 'Purity: A Novel' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Franzen the person is... problematic. Franzen the novelist is a gifted wizard who keeps the reader turning the pages with an entertaining and surprising pair of intertwined plots while inspiring new perspectives on the topic at hand -- in this case, purity, which is interpreted variously as moral extremism, good intentions, and self-destructive delusion. The idea that life is about learning to make practical decisions in the face of a morally ambiguous universe is not a new one, but this book made me consider the topic in ways I hadn't before. My favorite Franzen novel so far. And -- thank goodness -- there are only 3 full pages about birds.

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