Purity
Author: Jonathan Franzen
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
B+
Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, is a conceptual relative of his first. That novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was about a shadowy conspiracy of Indian immigrants trying to take over the government of St. Louis — a concept so bizarre and alien that Franzen himself described it as a sci-fi novel that’s all fi and no sci.
Similarly, Purity at times seems more like dystopian fiction than the kind of suburban realism one generally associates with Franzen. The novel concerns a Wikileaks-like outfit called The Sunlight Project, where a colony of overachieving millennials buzz around techily in reconverted Bolivian farm buildings and arrange casual hookups with each other over the staff intranet. Several long sequences are also set in socialist Germany and represent life in the G.D.R. as a banal, Orwellian hell of paranoia, secrecy, espionage, illicit sex, and murder.
Unlike The Twenty-Seventh City (which suffered, I think, from an interest in ideas and processes and systems over people), Purity is no mere vehicle for authorial sniping at young people, social media, or feminism. On the contrary, the novel is tender and forgiving and earnest and deeply sympathetic. Thus, it’s Franzen’s most youthful novel yet. If novels can have personalities — “unbroken series of successful gestures,” to use the definition from Gatbsy — then Purity‘s gestures of character are exactly the kind you often find in young people: The book is stumped and frazzled, self-amused, preternaturally tired, sarcastic, jaded enough to know itself a little, but not so jaded as to abjure all hope in the possibility of true love or meaning or the idea that the world can be made a better place.
This provides an important contrast to The Corrections. Whereas the characters in that novel were all trying, and failing, to escape reality, the characters in Purity seek confrontation with reality, a direct engagement. There’s a desire for authenticity, a fear of phoniness that runs through all the characters and across the novel’s own generational lines. In fact, of the novel’s five primary characters, four work in the field of journalism, a reality-engaging profession if there ever was one. For all the scorn heaped on hipster-millennials, if that taxonomic category has any meaning whatsoever, it’s to describe young people who yearn for a life lived outside the trap of homogenized commercialism Franzen targeted in The Corrections.
In truth, one reason Purity feels like such a departure from Franzen’s previous novels is that his targets in this book are more fratricidal than partisan. Strong Motion contained an argument against conservative political religiosity. The Corrections was an attack on the spiritual corruptions born of boom-time capitalism. Freedom was, in part, a critique of Bush-era hyperindividualism. But the heart of Purity is a debate inside Franzen’s own liberalism. It’s Bernie versus Hillary — a well-meaning and pragmatic liberal versus a burn-the-whole-motherfucker-down radical.
This debate plays out as a long-running series of domestic rows between two of the book’s primary characters, Tom and Annabel. Tom’s a little mushy, a little benign — a writer who heads an independent, Denver-based online journalism organ. He has a longtime girlfriend named Leila who still occasionally gives handjobs to her former husband. (Well, actually, those two are still married, but he’s severely disabled, and the handjobs aren’t romantic but have an almost medical charitability to them. But come on, how’s Tom supposed to feel about that? Still, it’s not like Leila’s divorced, although she basically is, but obviously that means she literally isn’t, while it’s also sort of like Tom and Leila are married, though not quite, even though they live together, but not all the time. It’s all delightfully Updikean and messy and modern and weirdly sweet.) But so then, Annabel is Tom’s ex-wife, with whom he had a decade-long marriage founded on monstrous codependency.
The problem with this marriage is A) the participants are both crazy about each other, and B) Annabel possesses a purity of moral vision that Tom simply doesn’t. Tom tries, though. He truly does. For example, Annabel insists that Tom sit down on the toilet to pee. Her logic is simple and persuasive, but still somehow alien to Tom’s (and, most likely, the reader’s) sensibility. Her argument is that she, as a woman, cannot pee standing up, so the angle at which her pee strikes the surface of the toilet water will never result in spatter outside the bowl, while Tom, on the other hand, as a man, can pee standing up, so his pee can cause spatter. Even if Tom guards ruthlessly against this, he can’t make a 100 percent guarantee to his wife that it won’t happen, while she insists, not unreasonably, to have the right to a spatter-free bathroom experience. He gives Annabel a sense of irrefutable injury; he has her express this injury in relation to pee-spatter; and he then moves seamlessly from the diuretic comedy to a moment of true interhuman tenderness, an opening in the male-female dialogue where hurt gives invitation to understanding. (“You can’t even see how unfair it is. You have no idea. No idea.”) Our politics, right now in America, is full of failures like this — failures to see the pain of another because we’re too busy arguing that the unfairness doesn’t exist, or shouldn’t count.
Annabel’s argument about pee reminds me of the first lines of John’s Gospel, where the writer uses the word “logos” to mean soul (bear with me), but where “logos” can also mean “argument” (and “logic,” in fact). If you think of the soul like I do, as a ghostly compendium of neurochemical holograms, then certainly our politics, and the inevitable shaping of our politics by things like upbringing, circumstance, gender, personal history — variables that affect the habits of mind, even as they’re stored and employed in the very quadrants of the mind they affect — then certainly a woman’s politics is a part of her soul, as unique and unrepeatable as DNA, or a single train of memories.
Franzen understands this down to his toenails. Everyone is different, and everyone has the moral right to be taken seriously. And if you can’t take everyone seriously, then at the very least you ought to take a few people seriously — your spouse, your child, your parent — because if you don’t, you’ll die more alone than you need to, more alone than anyone ever should. It’s tough. Love is advanced citizenship; you have to want it bad. You have to be willing to give. That’s why, for me, the heart of this moment is in that phrase: “Her hurt mattered more to me than my own rightness.” Isn’t this exactly how we should always feel, at least about the people we love? But maybe about everybody, too?
