Not far off 200 pages into Jonathan Franzen’s very long – and, to be honest, exhausting – new saga, the back history of one of the characters is being developed. Leila is a serious journalist; she also has a knack of attracting powerful and useful men.
It wasn’t always thus. In her earlier life, Leila had “considered herself more attractive than the quality of her past boyfriends would suggest.” It is clear Leila has an ego; she is certainly driven.
At one time she had attended a creative writing course. “Leila worked hard on her fiction and even harder on her comments on her younger rival’s work. She learned exactly where to stick the needle, and soon she had Charles’s attention.”
Charles is the cool-older-man-Harley Davidson-riding famous novelist in the regulation final act of a failed marriage. He duly leaves his wife and rides off into the sunset, or at least to New Mexico, and weds Leila. But it doesn’t end there. Charles is a minor character yet he serves a vital function: he seems to explain Franzen’s mission, which may well also be his dilemma.
Charles "settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness. Length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. . . . Charles needed to spend weeks on end doing nothing. Although the university asked very little of him, it asked for more than nothing."
That need for heft and girth drives Franzen’s bulky fifth novel, which consists of seven long chapters and of which only one, the most interesting, is told through the first person. The “Purity” of the title is a young woman who prefers to be called Pip, about to make her way in the world. Sounds familiar? However, Pip’s great expectations are somewhat less romantic than those nurtured by Dickens’s young man.
Secrets of the past
Franzen’s Pip is burdened by college debt, and so decides to find the father she has never known in the hope he will pay. Her eccentric, isolated mother is broken-hearted that the baby she raised is now grown and living elsewhere. But the mother remains intent on keeping the past a secret from Pip. “I have the right to love you more than anything in this world” she cries. The exasperated daughter counters: “No you don’t! No you don’t! No you don’t.”
Ironically Pip’s quest, though as convoluted as these enterprises tend to be, is not all that riveting. Nor is she; Pip’s erratic personality gives Franzen something to semi-comically exploit before his attention moves elsewhere – to a bizarre East German childhood.
It first seems that Franzen is setting out to write the great internet novel. He briskly ushers his version of Julian Assange on stage in the form of an attractive and damaged product of the former East Germany. The aptly named Andreas Wolf has a weakness for young girls. In fact, it was always thus: years ago, back in the GDR, he committed a shocking (if completely unconvincing) crime to help a girl he liked.
Anyhow, in Pip’s present, Wolf is based in Bolivia operating the Sunlight Project, a kind of holiday camp for young followers who are determined, like him, to expose all the secrets in the world. Pip is a likely recruit; she has many reasons for disliking secrets.
The narrative is dominated by deception, betrayals and the bitter resentments that destroy relationships. The internet element is largely conducted through its impact on developing and breaking stories, as seen in Leila’s world as a journalist (she gave up fiction) while working for a news agency in Denver run by Tom Aberant, the most sympathetic character in a cast of oddballs. Franzen balances breaking news with keeping secrets.
Purity is a surprisingly half-hearted and very slight exposé of global surveillance, certainly when compared with Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, which was published earlier this year. There is none of that book's menace, which Cohen achieves in a far more ambitious work that actually reflects the weird world in which we live.
Sentence for sentence, Franzen is left trailing, as he is also in the wake of Peter Carey's cohesive Amnesia (2014). Carey is a better writer and there is no doubt that Don DeLillo or Russell Banks would have mastered the technology in order to consolidate the narrative.
Instead Franzen concentrates on his speciality: forensically over-described characters. Pip has a fast mouth as well as a bruised heart and questions that need answers. Domineering mothers, absent fathers; one man loves a beautiful woman who turns out to be boring, another loves a beautiful woman who is obviously crazy.
"Humans are troubled creatures" appears to be the message. Reading Purity is like being locked in a room with the box set of a sitcom that wasn't too funny the first time round.
For me, the first 313 pages was a struggle. Then comes "lelo9n8a0rd", the strongest sequence, which begins with a password and continues until page 443. The narrative switches to a flat conversational first person and Purity acquires an unexpected and convincing sincerity.
Tom, Pip’s boss, looks back on his disastrous marriage to Anabel, an unhinged artist. It begins with them attempting another post-divorce meeting, which tend to follow a pattern of argument, sex and argument. The exchanges are vicious. Tom then recalls their earlier days together and the many indications that it was doomed.
Best of all is when Tom as an unhappily married journalist meets Andreas Wolf in Berlin as young men and confesses: “I’m so fucking sick of who I am.” “I know that feeling, too,” says Andreas. There they share a secret, which is completely unbelievable. But then so is the novel.
Strangely for a book about secrets, Franzen doesn't have any. His coincidences are so thin they are transparent. Ostensibly a comedy with some laughs, largely courtesy of Anabel's tormented worldview, Purity is boring, slow-moving, full of talk and predictable.
Many US novelists write funnier novels that also say a great deal more. And they say it better in far fewer words.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent. Jonathan Franzen will read from Purity, as part of International Literature Festival Dublin, on October 5th, at 8pm, in the RDS Concert Hall; ilfdublin.com
