Purity, by Jonathan Franzen (2015)

Whatever else might be said about Purity, this novel completely absorbed me. I put off work and sleep, lost track of which train stop was coming up and whose bag or elbow was pressed into my hip because of the gravitational pull of Franzen’s prose, plot, and characters. Purity is a tangled mess of a family drama, messier than The Corrections because it doesn’t present itself as a family drama until fairly late. At its center is Purity “Pip” Tyler, a talented but habitually “hostile” woman in her early twenties, who may or may not have a mysterious benefactor and be the object of great expectations. Pip is saddled with $100k+ of student debt and a hypochondriac co-dependent recluse of a mother, but she doesn’t know who her father is. Her search for him is the engine driving Purity’s plot into investigative journalism and a Wikileaks-type operation headed by a magnetic, disturbed East German named Andreas Wolf.

The main things I want to say about this book are that the prose and the quality of Franzen’s thought are gorgeous and hilarious, and that feminism is weirdly simplified and degraded, a perplexing thing in a novel that seems intent on drawing out the complexities of so many other social issues.

As far as I can tell, Franzen’s project as a novelist and essayist is to explore “the infinite variety of human badness” (as he says in this book), but to render it so richly that you are more taken with the power and beauty of art than you are appalled at whatever bit of nastiness he happens to be dwelling in. Franzen is a comic novelist, and Purity is a comedy in the sense that it is hyperbolic and riduculous but still wise. As in The Corrections and Freedom, some of Purity’s most memorable scenes are tragic or potentially tragic set pieces of existential lowness. One of these unfolds as Andreas Wolf prepares to commit a murder he has planned with a young woman he’s in love with. As he waits alone for her to arrive with their intended victim, things are not going well in a way that reminded me of the plight of a dedicated artist trying to work but sidelined by distraction:

“Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.

Interesting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign.

As I followed Andreas’s ludicrously bad preparations I was a giggling, tense jumble of nerves, and as the scene spun out I was disgusted and riveted. If I’m going to read about an attempted murder (having never been party to one), I want, as much as possible, to be thrown into the physical and emotional realness of it, to have to deal with the repercussions at an existential level, and I think Franzen takes us to those places. Like a good stand-up comedy set that drags you laughing into darkness, these set pieces left me unsettled in a way that good art should.  

Less satisfying is Franzen’s treatment of feminism, which feels deliberately dismissive. As a reader, I don’t need portraits of social movements I believe in to be glowing, but I do need them to be honest and full. But in the world of Purity, feminism is a movement whose promise has always exceeded its utility, and feminists are people whose ideals never catch up with their biology or their self-inflicted circumstances. Much has been made in various venues of this scene between Anabel, a feminist conceptual artist, and her husband, Tom (who narrates here):

            “A word about the toilet,” she’d said one day, early on.

            “I always raise the seat,” I said.

            “That’s the problem.”

            “I thought the problem was guys who think they can aim through the seat.”

            “I appreciate that you’re not one of them. But there’s a spatter.”

            “I wipe the rim, too.”

            “Not always.”

            “OK, room for improvement.”

            “But it’s not just on the rim. It’s on the underside of the rim and on the tile. Little drops.”

            “I’ll wipe there, too.”

            “You can’t wipe the whole bathroom every time. And I don’t like the smell of old urine.”

            “I’m a guy! What am I supposed to do?”

We know what Tom is supposed to do. And, horror of horrors, that is what he does: he sits. Roxanne Gay points to this scene and to Anabel’s character as off-notes that sour the novel. When Terry Gross asked him about the scene on a recent episode of “Fresh Air,” Franzen pointed away from feminism and toward an immature and toxic relationship: the scene, he was saying, was fleshing out a kind of unhealthy co-dependency we’ve all seen or been part of where two people attempt complete transparency as they try to merge their identities, always with awful results. Reading that scene, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, that is how it struck me, and I cringed and laughed. But looking at the novel as a whole, some of its darkest moments are between Anabel and Tom, so even if Anabel is a farcical character, she pulls the moral center very far towards a pole where feminism as a grounding principle for living is silly and unworkable.

The two characters who could drag it back are Pip and Leila, a Pulitzer-winning journalist on the scent of a huge story involving drug traffickers and a possibly-smuggled nuclear warhead. But Pip is so young and lost, and Leila is so compromised by her romantic life (paraplegic husband; emotionally damaged boss/boyfriend; she lives, essentially, in both their houses without any real place of her own) that they cannot bring things into balance.

And maybe it’s unfair to Franzen to suggest that he owes us balance of this kind. So for me, the problem isn’t so much that patriarchal culture outscores feminist culture; the problem is that the word “feminist” is dropped pretty often as a descriptor in this book, but there’s very little working through of what it means that isn’t absurd. In the world of this novel, it’s a label that liberals adopt because they’re supposed to but is ultimately useless beyond any one character’s self-conception, rather than a well thought-out way of living. Sure, any ethical stance can serve people more or less well in difficult circumstances. But to reduce it to farce, in the case of Anabel, and to essentially useless, in the case of Leila, feels disingenuous and incomplete.

These are the aspects of the book I gravitated toward, but it’s just as much (if not more) about relationships between mothers and sons and mothers and daughters, and the shaky but important differences between secrecy and privacy in the internet age. It is a dazzling and frustrating performance by a great writer that is well worth reading, and probably re-reading.