Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity

Purity should be praised as highly readable and inviting, yet not spoon fed or dumbed down. It’s also nice that unlike most Great American Novelists, there is no undercurrent of angst that permeates Franzen’s writing, and therefore few tiresome, superfluous sidetracks to the story. It is a smart read without feeling like a school assignment.

As usual, the author shows an uncanny talent for writing about a woman’s feelings and thought processes, as if he has access to their minds. Also delightful is Franzen’s subtle descriptions of how a crazy person thinks, especially women in relationships. Indeed, he doesn’t candy coat or go politically correct when describing the male-female power paradigm, either. In a pussified world where the inherent differences between the sexes would be deemed non-existent, this is a relief. (Check out a random female-authored review of Purity and feel the cat dander flying in the face of Franzen’s honesty on the topic.)

Also appreciated is the lack of gaping plot holes or just downright silly omissions or oversights that remove the reader from the story, (“Wait, if that happened, then this happening doesn’t make sense.”) In other words, the reader rarely gets Baldacci’d. In fact, Purity harbors only two or three examples of this transgression, which isn’t much for (a slightly excessive) five hundred sixty-three pages.

One is when an intern and her (attached) boss share a get-to-know-you evening coffee, and both ignore texts from their mentor/significant other in the process. Since the meeting absolutely can’t resemble a date in any fashion, this would never happen. Also, a character begins to fall for a woman even though she harbors a venereal disease, but the guy seems entirely unconcerned about the detail, and it’s never mentioned again. And as always seems to be the case with any writer, a character finds a potential partner is enormously wealthy, but is so (unrealistically) virtuous that the fact fails to prominently affect their pros and cons list.

And speaking of minor, yet annoying flaws, there are at least three passages where a word (or phrase) is repeated twice within three sentences, (hypothesis, disclosive) violating what is pretty much creative writing rule number one. Even worse, one of these is the cliché “down in flames.”  One can only wonder if Franzen’s ego is so large that he thinks he has license to distract the reader in such fashion, just because he can.

But in the end the flaws in Purity are minor, and the journey into Franzen’s fertile imagination was well worth the page turning time. I don’t care how cheesy the author photo is (why not have a sweater tied around your neck while you’re at it, Jon?)