Purity

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 writers of the generation /just/ preceding his pioneered and in doing so, effectively changed the literary novel.

On that basis I was willing to suspend judgement and it is also worth saying: there's a lot of plot, it's deftly handled, the prose is decent, and all the characters that aren't mothers are reasonably convincing (though I think the book would be significantly improved by Franzen's editor cutting maybe 40 - 60% of his characters' ruminations).

Once I got to the section narrated in the first person by the journalist, author about how he met his ex-wife / Pip's mother, the whole thing fell apart. The baffling, stupid, phoned-in riffs about how feminism drove this guy to devote his life to making the world a better place as a form of penance (Franzen's idea of what people doing useful work do, and indeed what life is like, seems to be stuck in the late nineties), the introduction of what has to be the twelfth, demanding, neurotic and status-obsessed mother, the total implausibility of the ex-wife's unlikableness, the omnipresent stain on American fiction since DFW of contentless recursion about interiority ('she was thinking that I knew that she was thinking and on the basis of that thinking thought further') belatedly made me realise that this is a terrible novel about airing sexual neurosis and the consequent resentment being directs at individuals each charcter holds responsible and it is about nothing else.

I have no problem with these as subjects in principle. A lot of mothers are demanding, neurotic and status-obsessed, but once the frippery of setting, or vague critique of America (which is reasonably often confused with socialism) is pulled back there is nothing else going on here.

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. He is waiting for the youth of today to grow up and realize this, but many of the young people I know are already aware of this and avoid their micro-hate-crimes not because they think they can escape guilt-free, but more as acts of self-improvement.

The other way to escape guilt is the insanity defense. In daily life, this is regular old mental illness. You are granted this pardon by a doctor in the form of a diagnosis. For Andreas Wolf, the diagnosis is given by the world at large and perhaps by the reader who is privy to his thoughts. For Anabel, it's given by her husband, father and daughter (and the reader as well) but maybe we're given to understand that being an artist is itself akin to being crazy.

Others can have "neuroticisms"--Pip wants to be ordered to do things, for example. Not mentally ill. Tom's mother is always self-deprecating. A character trait, not a symptom, which in the decadent West would be best handled by a life coach, not a doctor. Andreas's mother who sexually acts out and who lies on the floor in semi-catatonic fugue states--a borderline case. She counts as mentally ill but since her symptoms differ from her crimes, she remains guilty. (In the Communist East, being a dissident is a mental illness but that's because being put in a mental hospital is like being jailed without a trial.) Annegret feels bad for her crimes and tries to make amends so is not mentally ill.

If I belabor this, it's because it is part of what I didn't like about the book. These distinctions are not part of the story so much as devices used by Franzen to determine who counts as good or bad, pure or impure. For myself, I just didn't find some of the characters all that interesting. Parts of the book were difficult to get through because I couldn't care enough. Andreas's mental illness wasn't believable to me. It was the creation of a writer who doesn't fully appreciate psychological problems but has read books and watched movies about the abnormal psychologies created by other writers. I found his ultimate demise an easy cop out for a complicated plot.

My favorite parts were Tom and Anabel's relationship; more for when it was "good" than when it went bad. I believed Franzen has a good understanding of the attraction of loony intensity and that ultimately, to be guilt free is to satisfy its demands. In that sense, Anabel was like the old testament god, rendering judgment. But didn't she really understand that all money had blood on it--not just the cash that's easy to trace back to its violent roots? (See how pure I am in saying this? Purer than Anabel herself!)

I also liked much of Pip's journey, though I found her relationship with Steven and later with Jason tiresome.

Franzen may have misgivings about technology, but he seems to understand it enough to write about key loggers and guessing passwords. Or maybe someone helped him with that part. He didn't seem to know that there were password cracking programs to brute-force encrypted pdfs. The internet as having the same failings as socialism may be a clever answer to the tech evangelists, but there are good things about the internet he is ignoring. That the internet lacks purity should be a given for the author of a book showing the disaster that comes from trying too hard to achieve it.

I plan to read his next book despite his lack of purity.