With Updike now gone, and Roth no longer writing, the baton
of “Great American Novelist” has been passed to Jonathan Franzen. After all, he was anointed as such by Time Magazine after the publication of
his last novel, Freedom. Sure, there are other important American
novelists; John Irving, Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, Joyce Carol Oats, to name
but a few. But Franzen happens to stand
out, although John Irving also merits such consideration. Irving is the more prolific and they share a
Dickensian perspective on character development and social commentary. These are writers of substance and so when Franzen’s
Purity was published, I made sure I
was first on Amazon’s list to receive a copy – it was even delivered on a
Sunday.
I wish I had had the time to simply sit down and read it
through in a couple of days. Instead, my
usual routines encroached as well as my propensity to draw out the books I
enjoy the most, lingering over certain passages.
Franzen, like Irving, is a writer’s writer, possessing a
unique take on story development, the intersecting of characters, the timelessness
of subjects he covers, as well as his observations of contemporary life. Remember Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – his social commentary on the themes
of the 1980’s, greed, racism, politics and class separation? Franzen addresses the “new” issues of the post
millennium, power struggles between men and women, global warming, the changes
wrought by the Internet – both in how we communicate and how it’s impacted
interpersonal relationships – and the hanging Sword of Damocles which is
nuclear catastrophe. These are high wire
themes, anxiety producing, and disturbing.
So one could say that social realism is Franzen’s
strength, but his writing is more than that.
In reading this novel I had the sense that it was writing itself, it having
an internal energy that flowed through, rather than by, the author. I know that sounds otherworldly, but I felt
as if I was witnessing something that is happening in the here and now, a story
into which the reader gives himself over, with characters that are real.
I used to rely on Updike’s Rabbit novels, a new one
published approximately every ten years for four decades, to capture this
nation’s Zeitgeist, and I felt part of it.
Franzen is like Updike in this regard, not to mention matching Updike’s
towering intellect. These are two very smart, robust writers. Updike was elegantly fluent with language,
whereas Franzen’s prose hits you like a sledgehammer, delving deeply into his
characters’ inner lives. Purity
expands upon his last novel, Freedom
which concludes with the first few years of the 21st century. The state of our hyper world is evolving
faster than in Updike’s time and it is remarkable to see those changes so well
documented in this novel.
At the heart of the story is a literal murder, but there
are symbolic murders throughout, men and women in sexual power struggles, adult
children and their parents who have their own special power struggles, identity
crises in abundance. Through their actions, these characters bring about an
existential disconnection that seems to epitomize this second decade of the 21st
century. There is a healthy dose of
misanthropic analysis to be pondered.
Structurally the novel consists of several intersecting
stories, timelines sometimes out of order.
At the heart is “Pip” as Purity Tyler is known. Pip’s nickname is Franzen’s hat tip to
Dickens’ character in Great Expectations. Like Dickens’ Pip, Purity is the thread that
ties together many lives. First our Pip is on a quest to discover the identity
of her father – and by so doing hoping to eradicate a student loan of six
figures (“her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty”), and find out
exactly who she is, intellectually, morally, socially. She is adrift and works at a “shit job” (the
implication being all loan-burdened graduates are subjugated to those kinds of
jobs) as a cold call sales agent for “Renewable Solutions” -- selling home
owners on using government renewable energy tax credits by investing in
projects for their homes, the firm taking a big slice of the tax credit.
The work is demeaning to her intellect. Her boss is demeaning. She retreats each night to a rented room in a
home populated by a number of dissidents who have a Utopian vision – under the
rubric of the “Occupy movement.” Their theory was that the technology driven
gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would
inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to
most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could
not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an
economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could
join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby
creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose
overwhelming size would compel social change.
She considers the name “Purity” the most shameful word in the English language because it was her given
Name. It made her ashamed of her own
driver’s license, the Purity Tyler beside her sullen head shot, and made
filling out any application a small torture.
There are two male figures dominating her life, Andreas
Wolf, an East German ex-pat, and now a renegade charismatic leader of a Wiki-leaks
kind of organization dubbed the “Sunshine Project,” and Tom Aberant, a
brilliant on line journalist, founder of the Denver Independent with money left
to him by his ex-wife’s father.
Tom’s ex-wife, with whom he was madly in love, Anabel
Laird, eschews money as the root of all her family’s sins, and during their eleven
years of marriage leads Tom around like a trained animal. Hilarious – getting him to pee sitting down
as that’s the way women do it! And she
can only have sex during the three days around the full moon. Anabel impresses
me as a nut job.
Nonetheless they endure a marriage mired in a “vow of
poverty” which culminates in a power struggle sexual conquest. In a departure from Franzen’s third person
narrative, there is one chapter with a first person narrative from Tom’s
perspective in which he describes their very strange relationship (in my day,
you simply fell in love, got married, and had kids – not so simple any more).
Earlier, Tom had met Andreas, both as relatively young
men, a chance meeting, like many of the crisscrossing incidents in the novel (a
little like Hardy!), so they have a long standing connection. Andreas Wolf is compared to Julian Assange of
WikiLeaks, although Wolf considers his “Sunlight Project” more “purpose
driven.” He becomes an Internet rock
star and having come from a totalitarian regime in East Germany finds the
Internet at first his savior and then his burden. He is plainly a sociopath.
While still in East Germany Andreas meets the beautiful
but very young Annagret. Although she is
half his age, Annagret becomes Andreas’ first real love. He is willing to do anything for her. Ultimately Annagret becomes part of the
Sunlight Project and she is the one who inveigles Pip to join and be an intern
in Bolivia where Andreas’ operation becomes ensconced. Pip becomes Andreas’ new love object as by
that time Annagret is out of the picture.
He allows Pip access to some of his inner thoughts: There's
the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do
you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain
things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's
no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you
even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his
identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the
inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a
thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to
believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other
people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Pip to Andreas: But it's a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people's
secrets for a living.
Andreas remembers the Old Republic in light of today’s
massive disintermediation by technology, an interesting passage which in effect
describes a “new class” that is nonetheless as heartless as the class it
replaced: The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone,
a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but
perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked
Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal
of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like
brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but
inside, victory over the class enemy was assured…. Outside, the middle class
was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or
stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other
religiously, but inside, disruptive new
technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized
ad hoc communities were rewriting the
rules of creativity, the revolution
rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New
Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzz-words, collective, collaborative.
Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this,
apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their
ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.
After Tom’s torturous relationship and parting with his
wife, a professional journalist, Leila, enters Tom’s life. Leila’s relationship with Tom is an unusual
one as she continues to be married to an over-the-hill, and now partially
paralyzed, novelist /professor, Charles, keeping two homes, one with Charles
and the other with Tom. One of the
overarching themes of the novel – the “new” feminism is expressed in her
relationship with Tom: Tom was a strange hybrid feminist,
behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. ‘I get feminism on an
equal-rights issue….What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the
same as men, or different and better than men.’
And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had
remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those
women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had
benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them. She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and
the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.
After Pip interns for Andreas on the Sunshine Project
(naturally, Andreas falls for Pip but Pip keeps her distance with some regrets),
she winds up as Leila’s protégé in Denver, learning the craft of journalism. (Long
story about the “coincidence” that leads to that connection and a spoiler as
well, so enough said.) But Leila is jealous of Pip’s good looks and youth.
Leila – with Pip as her researcher, skills she learned from
the Sunshine Project --is trying to scoop a story for Tom’s online Denver
Independent before the Washington Post gets to it: the lack of controls of a
nuclear arsenal in Amarillo. Here
Franzen gives a humorous hat tip to the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s
1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove, with Maj.
'King' Kong played by Slim Pickens riding a thermonuclear bomb to its target. Two
minor characters in the novel, Cody, who has stolen a replica of an A-Bomb, and his girlfriend,
Phyllisha who thinks it is real (and it could have been because of the lack of
controls) play out this scene: He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had
at his disposal. He wanted her to take
off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail
up for him….She went ahead and did what he said….To be that close to so much
potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin
of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when
she orgasmed. It was pretty great, she
had to say.
It is through Tom and Leila that thermonuclear anxiety
and a healthy dose of misanthropy emerges: Tom's
theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial
intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up
almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than
a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of
existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the
chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were
vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila
neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday
scenarios was Please make me the first
person killed; but she'd forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and
still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want
the Amarillo story to be large. The world's fear of nuclear weapons was
unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and, vomiting: the longer the world
lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be….Climate
change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say
nothing of the NFL, passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver
Bronco. Leila was afraid and felt like
the only one who was.
Amen to that, Jonathan Franzen.
Speaking of Jonathans, Franzen knows how to engage in
some self deprecating humor, Leila’s novelist husband, Charles, saying to Pip: So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only New York Times Book Review,
you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with
talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.
In Andreas’ life we have an overbearing mother, as we
have a passive but doting mother in Pip’s life and Tom’s mother is omnipresent,
warning Tom about Anabel. There are story
lines galore, many characters, multigenerational dysfunctionality, and then the
real world of the 21st century to channel. Franzen captures all in this episodic novel.
[Pip] and her peers
were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting.
Towards the end of the novel Pip was
thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for
power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the
struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it? But
those thoughts did not deter her from her quest for honesty and trust which
underlies her entire journey.
One can only have “great expectations” for Jonathan
Franzen’s future work.
