Purity starts out, as Jonathan Franzen’s books do, with a word used unusually well, a little signal that the author is in control. In The Corrections, it was “the berserk wind.” In Freedom it was “conniving with the coal industry.” In Purity, it was “without undue weirdness transpiring,” where “transpiring” has the sound of the old meaning—not “happening” but “leaking out.” That feeling of being in a comfortable seat on a transatlantic flight doesn’t let up. He’s going to make sure we’re entertained for this trip; we won’t have to wait more than ten pages between sex scenes, usually much less.
For almost 400 pages, all these pneumatic sex setups have the feeling of physics problems from a universe without friction—should Andreas feel worse about having sex with 52 teenage girls who haven’t been abused or one who has been abused, but he really loves her? Should Tom feel worse about leaving his wife for a woman who is 28 or a woman who is 41, but she has a Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer is for group reporting? In the logic that governs all the book’s equations, any theoretical 28-year-old would be a woman of higher value, so Tom lets himself feel less bad about leaving his wife for the Pulitzer Prize winner. When she gets a little older, sleeping with her is the moral equivalent of veganism, practically a charitable donation. If men would leave their wives for slender, middle-aged Pulitzer Prize winners instead of shampoo-smelling menstruating twenty-somethings, we could defeat global warming.
That’s the purity of the title, the yearning toward a state of cleanliness free of all kinds of sins—sins against the environment, sins of capitalism and socialism, sins against health and animals, but above all, the sins of masculinity, a man’s half-ashamed feeling that maleness itself is an attack on something less powerful, femaleness. Purity is also the name of a character who has $130,000 of student loan debt, but in this frictionless universe, she isn’t poor in the way that would keep her from being rude to her boss, or walking away from her cheap living arrangement and traveling the world. She’s not the kind of poor that would get under her fingernails or limit her options. Mostly she’s poor in the way that gets her into sexy situations. Almost everyone else in the book is rich—sexy rich—but most of them feel a bit bad about it.
There’s some heavy-handed signaling about Purity’s links to Great Expectations—the plots and themes are similar, but the souls of the two books are different. Great Expectations doesn’t have a single page, not a paragraph, that’s not both funny and sharp beyond anything else even Dickens ever wrote. Great Expectations is written like a note Dickens put on his last scrap of paper stuffed in his only bottle; every word is the most important thing he ever said. Purity is entertaining but it’s not that book, or even really trying to be. Purity doesn’t even hit the ground fully until around page 342, when the landing gear engages, jarring after all the champagne and warm nuts. I started taking more notes. Franzen isn’t likely to write another book as deeply felt as The Corrections, but Purity eventually became something interesting in a similar way.