
I have read all of Jonathan Franzen’s books. I am as passionate about his work as he is about birds. And if you have ever read/watched an interview with him you are already thinking, “whoa, she loves him too much.” Purity (2016) is his fifth fiction book and it’s another hefty one at 562 pages.
Purity tells the story of Pip Tyler and how she ends up working for a
company called The Sunlight Project while in search of her unknown father. This
is where she meets Andreas Wolfe (a Julian Assange-type). The book details his life in East Germany and
how he started the Sunlight Project (a wikileaks-type website) once the Berlin
wall came down.
The other two main characters are Leila Helou and Tom Aberrant. Leila is
definitely the most interesting to me. Her storyline focuses on how she
balances her simultaneous relationship with Tom, the founder of the online
newspaper she works for, and her now-paraplegic husband. Both of them know
about each other, so it’s not so much an infidelity story as it is a "hyper
fidelity" one … FYI I'm a Patty sympathizer (from Freedom). Tom’s storyline reveals how he got the $20 million to
start the online newspaper and what happened with his first wife Anabel.
Most of Franzen’s books do span over a few
generations, but I found Purity
particularly interesting for how all of the characters eventually coincide. I
would also say it is one of my favourite Franzen endings. The only reason I am
not 100% on this is because The
Twenty-Seventh City has a very disturbing ending that would play really
well on film. ANYWAYS … the ending is
almost comedic? This a spoiler free blog so just read it and enjoy it.
I asked my parents to PVR Late Night With Seth Myers a few weeks
ago because Franzen was coming on to talk about the 20-episode Showtime series
coming out based on the book (it will star Daniel Craig as Andreas). This is great
news to me as a few years ago I had a meltdown (which can be found in the
depths of my twitter account) when I learned that the HBO miniseries for The Corrections had been cancelled
before they ever started filming. What was interesting about the interview was
that Franzen talked a little bit about the process of creating such a
widespread, yet intersecting, storyline. Purity
spans across continents and decades but all of the characters are connected.
Franzen admitted that he doesn’t use story boards, but instead has these vague
ideas of where characters will be (e.g. East Germany, California, South
America) and then takes it as a “literary challenge” to write in plot that
eventually connects them all.
A favourite passage? Here’s one:
We’d been little more than
children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned
at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just
begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or
three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she
pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took
out my Swiss Army knife, I thought she might be thinking it, too. But instead
she was stabbing the five remaining condoms dead.
Overall, this was a really good read. It is probably one of Franzen’s most accessible books. The worst part is realizing you have to wait another ~5 years for something new from him..
No comments:
Post a Comment