From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
There's a short list of the best living authors, and Franzen is easily on it. Purity stands even taller than The Corrections, Freedom, and the underrated Strong Motion. His newest novel gives the reader characters to laugh with and at while also creating excellent and academic conversations about today's society. Purity is a thick, engrossing, and twisting novel peppered with chilling macabre scenes that ends perfectly. Its beauty and reflection on humanity helped me appreciate living today in the United States. Recommended By Jeffrey J., Powells.com
In Franzen's effort to catch the zeitgeist, Purity is a twenty-something drowning in student loan debt who is lured in by a Julian Assange figure whose past is more than what it seems. No one here is happy, perse, but they are familiar, and I couldn't get enough. Recommended By Ashleigh B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother — her only family — is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world — including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters — Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers — and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
Review
“Purity is the best book the prodigiously talented novelist has written ― funnier, looser, with more care for his characters . . . Purity offers the sense of ease of a virtuoso giving every appearance of enjoying himself.” The Christian Science Monitor
Review
“Mr. Franzen's most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet....The stories of the characters in Purity
zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their
psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen's determination to
build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable
of change, perhaps even transcendence....Mr. Franzen adroitly
dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian
coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to
entertain....Mr. Franzen has added a new octave to his voice.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Franzen has created a spectacularly engrossing and provocative twenty-first-century improvisation on Charles Dickens' masterpiece, Great Expectations...Purity will be one of the most talked about books of the season." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Synopsis
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters--Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers--and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
Synopsis
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book
"So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent" (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from "the most intelligent novelist of his] generation" (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including,
Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't
understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.
The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.
About the Author
Jonathan Franzen is the author of four other novels, most recently The Corrections and Freedom, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away and The Kraus Project,
all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres.