Purity by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 2/5 cats
i don’t even know what to say in this review – it’s a big book by a big author so there’s not going to be any shortage of reviews for it, both on here and in the greater world.
but me, i just didn’t like it.
and that surprised me. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i liked it a lot. this one sounded like such a crazy departure from franzen’s general small-scope but deep-focus take on themes of marriage and family and other interpersonal relationships (i mean, revolutionaries in the jungle??? franzen??), that i thought it would be really fun to see what he did with it.
unfortunately, what he did with it was to bore me and make me feel uncomfortable all at once.
jonathan franzen gets a lot of flak for being some kind of john updike redux, a less jewy philip roth; the ultimate white male novelist writing white male novels for white male readers and this book reads like him taking that criticism and thumbing his nose, saying “oh, man, you though i wrote like that before, check this out!” and ramping it up a thousand notches by being even whiter and maler.
in terms of the characters in this book, every mother is a bad mother, and they are the cause of sexual dysfunction/deviancy in their sons, most women have daddy issues, are hypersexualized and throw themselves at older men, the most “ooh-rah feminism” character is a mentally unstable narcissist with sexual hangups, prone to embarrassing political exhibitionist displays and so emasculating to her boyfriend that she makes him pee sitting down.
as for the racial elements – part of the book takes place in bolivia. bolivia! distant lands! and yet the focus is somehow upon a bunch of germans and entitled white trust fund kids hiding out in cultish servitude to their assange-y leader, exposing the secrets of dirty corporations and governments, and all the novel’s non-white characters, in bolivia or elsewhere, are drivers or gardeners or mentally challenged.
this has to be intentional, right? franzen is too deliberate an author to not be trying to provoke his critics and sustain their complaints with this, right??
i’m not the usually the one to complain about “how women are portrayed in novels”; that’s not top of the list of what i read books for. you tell me a good story, and i can overlook the fact that your characters (male or female) are not well-rounded or good role models or a little stereotyped. i don’t have any expectations for male novelists to write convincing and thoughtful female characters as long as the story itself is strong. but here – there are only so many different versions of damaged and vulnerable, but not sympathetic, women with a propensity to fling themselves sexually at older men you can encounter before it starts feeling like reading someone’s penthouse forum submission. once you see it you can’t stop seeing it, and in a 600-page book, sometimes you just want a little variety.
there’s just so much toxic hatred running through this book. so many horrible people, so many unsettling situations; it taints the entire book. the title is ironic, obviously, but reading this made me feel very unclean. it’s weird- i’m not usually turned off by toxic, either. there was just something about this book that made me unhappy, and every time i went to pick it back up again, i had to brace myself for it, a little.
i don’t even feel like writing any more about this – franzen isn’t a bad writer at all and he managed to flesh out an impressive number of sprawling storylines here and there’s a lot that is admirable, but the overall reading experience was so off-putting for me; not just the unpleasantness, but also how frequently boring and bloated the book was. my strong reaction to the book means it was effective at something at least, especially since the turn-offs here don’t typically turn me off, so at least i learned something about myself, but i’m not happy about it.
and neither is maggie.
