![]() ![]() And in fleshing out the most tortured character in the book, Internet whistle-blower Andreas Wolf, Franzen’s narrative gets bogged down in lengthy ruminations on the Internet and its perils. Franzen’s large-scale exploration of ideological purity and compromise feels a tad déjà vu (see Freedom, above). ![]() ![]() No one who loves Franzen’s books will regret reading this one.īut for me it ultimately wasn’t as satisfying as his last two novels. The wisdom and insights are often bracing, the writing punctuated by nifty metaphors (sex for one of the title character is “a tasty fish with so many small bones”). And like its predecessors, it demonstrates the author’s continued fixation on how messed-up families thwart their children’s lives - in the world and in coupledom. Like the two earlier books, Purity marries characters of lifelike quirkiness with up-to-the-minute social commentary. Now, having been dubbed “Great American Novelist” on the cover of Time magazine and then weathering five years of backlash, the singularly ambitious author is back with another Big Idea title, Purity. But in both books, Jonathan Franzen used those concepts brilliantly to take down the American Dream, millennial version. ![]() Lesser writers could easily look silly choosing titles such as The Corrections or Freedom, with the burden of expectation and risk of perceived pomposity such words carry. ![]()
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