Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Purity - Jonathan Franzen



I was primed to love this book, had been eagerly awaiting it since news of its September 2015 release date hit me in late 2014. I am a Franzen Fan. And as another reviewer has said, somewhere in here is a Great Novel. Franzen's voice is often laudable, parts of the story quite fabulous. But in a book about secret-keeping and whistleblowers and the digital revolution, I was left wondering exactly what he intended to say about those things. Other than that, sometimes, the whole truth should not be told. But I can't tell: is he in favour of projects like Wikileaks? Is he saying marriage profits more from truth telling or from secret-keeping? And even more frustrating, several major plot threads were opened up and then fizzled out with no real conclusion, leaving me unsatisfied and a little confused.

I saw Franzen interviewed when he was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. I was about halfway through the novel and still loving it. In response to a question about the genesis of this book he confessed that he really wanted to tell the story of a marriage. Then he thought, maybe there should also be a child. And then he added some other elements that had been percolating in his imagination for a number of years.

This genesis story is so funny to me, because it is precisely the story of the marriage - of Tom and Anabel - that doesn't quite work. Or the depth of analysis about the marriage seems out of place in a book that initially appears to be quite edgy and so much about Snowden / Assange type leaks - sunlight as the best disinfectant and all that. Once the history of Tom and Anabel came into play, the book started to feel like a bit of a hot mess. The character of Anabel is absurdly intense. She is a film-maker with such an extreme perfectionist streak that she has spent her whole life on one unfinished project, won't allow her husband to pursue any creative endeavours that might compete with hers, turns every conversation into an hours-long intellectual argument, and - critically - only permits sexual intercourse during the full moon, because that is the only time she is able to climax. Tom, on the other hand, proves himself to be so besotted by her that he is unable to stand up to her in any circumstance, even years after they have divorced and there are very good reasons for him to despise her. The story of their courtship and marriage reads as interesting, because Franzen is writing it and he is, really, a great writer. But to have this at the core of the novel felt like a betrayal of those readers whose interests he had piqued in the first 300 pages or so, with stories that promised to go somewhere - stories about Berlin during the Soviet era, the Stasi, the fall of the wall, the evolution of transparency groups like Wikileaks. To me, that was the core of this novel, or it should have been. Anabel and Tom are such extremes that no useful truths can be divined from their relationship. It is a case study, no more. Whereas Pip, the millennial, and Andreas, the accidental hero, and Leila, the determined do-gooder journo - these all felt like people who could carry a novel.

I was also far more interested in the Denver Independent and the Sunlight Project than I was in the history of Tom and Anabel, and then I was sorely disappointed when the story lines for each of those aspects of the book went nowhere, in particular. I am not a naive reader. I do not expect every thread to be tied up neatly in a bow. But the beginning of the book led me to believe that the end would come back, in a satisfying way, to Pip's quest for something more, to Andreas's lack of fulfillment, to the uneasy and entirely impure centre of the Sunlight Project, to Tom and Leila. If there was a marriage or relationship anchoring this book I wanted it to be that relationship, the Tom and Leila one. Leila! Smart, complex, likeable Leila. Not the ueber-narcissistic Anabel. Ugh.

Don't get me wrong: I didn't hate this. There is originality here. There is an enjoyable subversiveness to Franzen's description of Andreas as a paranoid criminal fleeing from his past, whose great fame and advertised passion for transparency arises only as a corollary to his secrecy and need to hide. To the notion of an organization called The Sunlight Project growing out of lies and deception. And I was fascinated by Franzen's portrayal of Stasi-era Berlin, which reveal Franzen's own interest in and understanding of Germany. There is violent crime here, and adultery, and underage sex, and a cult-like camp in the jungle. All of this infused with Franzen's easy writing style. Like I said, it could have been a great novel. I just feel like he got lost somewhere along the way, and unfortunately, so did I.

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