Jonathan Franzen 978-0-374-23921-3 Farrar,
Straus and Giroux 576 Pages; First Printing: Sept. 2015
That
yearning gets her caught up by Annagret, a German woman who recruits her into
The Sunlight Project. Annagret tells her Andreas Wolf, the leader of the
project - a band of hackers and other true believers - should be able to find
her father. Wolf came to his revolutionary zeal by happenstance in East Germany
as the Berlin Wall was coming down, and continued down that path because of the
fame. His problems with the totalitarian State had more to do with his
ambivalence toward his parents, specifically his mother with whom he shared a
love-hate relationship imbued with a ruinous oedipal complex. Conflict with the
State in all its forms, potentially maleness, and the desire and machinations
to remove or subdue it form the core of Purity.
As such, Purity is a violent novel,
and not necessarily physically, though there is a murder. Franzen’s contention or
presentation comes off as a mockumentary, a bit over the top, with characters
that, for the most part, refuse to take accountability for where they are in
life. In true narcissistic fashion, each decision is overanalyzed in order to
escape culpability and reach self-purity. The novel is messy, in that, aside
from structure, the story moves randomly like a code, a virus, spyware a hacker
has released. There are many takeaways from Purity,
including the conflict regarding where novelists, journalists and internet
leakers stand in the hierarchy, and whether technology has extended the
State’s ability to oppress, whereas in the past the State needed many
individual informants.
Recommendation: HIGH
Recommendation: HIGH
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Reviewed by Guichard Cadet