PURITY by Jonathan Franzen (Doubleday), 565 pages, $35 cloth. Rating: NN
Up till now I’ve defended Jonathan Franzen. That’s despite his skirmishes with Oprah and Jennifer Weiner, his curmudgeonly comments about social media and his bizarre statement about adopting an Iraqi war orphan to understand millennials.
The author of The Corrections and Freedom can write. Who cares what people who don’t read his books – and only troll Twitter – think?
But I’m reconsidering. His new novel is ponderous, bloated and tin-eared. Something’s wrong when a book only gets going at the 400-page mark.
There are four main characters. Pip Tyler, a cynical, underemployed young woman, is drowning in student debt and doesn’t know who her parents are – although she’s still in touch with her neurotic, hypochondriac mother, who won’t reveal her own real name or date of birth. Wily, charismatic Andreas Wolf grew up in East Germany before starting a Wikileaks-like project in Bolivia. Leila Helou is a Lebanese-American journalist who’s married to an aging novelist and soon begins work for a privately funded online news publication. And Tom Aberant owns that publication and is Leila’s lover.
Slowly, oh so slowly, the connections between these people start to appear, but only after endless exposition that doesn’t further the plot and adds only slightly to character. There are so many detours, including a weird meta passage about famous American writers named “Jonathan,” that the temptation to give up is strong.
Thematically, the book is rich in ideas about secrets, innocence and the cost of freedom – whether economic or political. The material about life under the Stasi and then German reunification is fascinating and more ambitious than anything else Franzen’s attempted.
But the characters, even Pip and her not-so-great expectations, are as wooden as the pieces on a chessboard. And I can’t believe an editor let words like “huffingly,” “self-hatingly” and – most egregious – “full-chestedly anorexic” slip through.
This book isn’t just bad, it’s huffingly, eye-rollingly bad.
Franzen appears at the Toronto Reference Library on October 27. torontopubliclibrary.ca.
glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi
