Book review: Purity, Jonathan Franzen

Writer Jonathan Franzen. Photo / Supplied

This novel contains multitudes: love, murder, marital terrorism, embarrassing sex, nasty sex, solo sex, the Stasi, internet leaks, missing nuclear weapons, missing fathers, overbearing mothers and a variety of interesting bowel disorders. What you won't find much of is purity. Just as Franzen's previous novel Freedom was really a book about inescapable constraint, so Purity is really a book about inevitable corruption (which makes it a considerably more enticing prospect).

Those who read The Corrections and Freedom will know how Franzen novels work: people, often well-intentioned, launch themselves into the world with idealistic conviction and are snapped back to misery by the tethers of family and society. His are blackly comic books about the souring of great expectations.

So meet Pip. She's a recent graduate with a lousy job and vast debts. She lives in a dive in Oakland and is in love with an activist called Stephen, "an older guy who not only didn't believe in money - as in US currency; as in the mere possession of it - but also had a wife". Like her Dickensian namesake, Pip does not know who her father is but hopes if she finds him, he might pay off her debt out of guilt.

Only Pip's real name is not Pip, it's Purity. Who could inflict such a name on a child? Her mother is a New Age recluse living in a cabin in the woods near Santa Cruz, where she spends her time working on her "Endeavour" (which involves a lot of breathing and sitting still). Not only is she an oppressively needy hypochondriac, but she also refuses to tell Pip who her father is.

Then Pip catches a break. Annagret, a beautiful young German radical, tries to recruit her for the Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-type organisation headquartered in Bolivia. The project is run by a charismatic transparency zealot called Andreas Wolf (a better-looking Julian Assange) who promises to use his hacking resources to help Pip find her father. She is flattered but reluctant; the Sunlight Project sounds "possibly cultish" and she can't abandon her mother, "the massive block of granite at the centre of her life".

Then, in one of those scenes that Franzen does better than pretty much anybody, Pip comprehensively humiliates herself in making a pass at Stephen, the married man. Suddenly, anywhere but Oakland seems appealing.

Franzen is not a transparency zealot, however. He knows, like Aristophanes' Lysistrata, who persuades the women of Athens to refuse their husbands sex until they make peace with Sparta, that there is power in withholding. He ends that section of the novel without telling us of Pip's final decision. Indeed, the first three of Purity's seven sections end with good old-fashioned cliffhangers. They are also mediated through different characters: the cumulative effect is thoroughly addictive. Switching voice and point of view to add a layered depth to his characters is a technique Franzen has mastered in previous novels. He makes it look very easy. It isn't.

The second section takes us to East Berlin in the 1980s and a young Wolf helplessly addicted to onanism. There are self-conscious references to Hamlet: Wolf is approached by "a ghost" (actually a tramp) who claims to be his father, has an icky relationship with his mother and may or may not be mad.

Wolf is not just Hamlet, however; he's darker and dirtier than that, more like Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov in heat. In his 20s, he earns a reputation as a dissident for writing an indelicate poem insulting the GDR. He is protected from the Stasi by his influential parents but at the cost of them severing contact with him; he ends up living in the basement of a church, working as a counsellor for vulnerable adolescents. Through this work he meets Annagret (later Pip's recruiter). Wolf feels for her a purity of love that he hopes will allow him to escape his sinister thoughts and general ennui. That's when things start to get interesting.

The third narrative strand concerns Leila Helou, a star investigative reporter for the Denver Independent, and Tom Aberant, her editor. Leila is technically married to a past-his-best experimental novelist but she lives with Tom, himself the survivor of a traumatic, suffocating marriage.

All these characters stagger under the weight of the secrets they carry. At one stage Pip has a revelation: "She could see - she thought she could see - that what adults did was suck it up and keep their secrets to themselves. Her mother, a grey-haired child in so many ways, was an adult in this one regard at least. She kept her secrets and paid the price."

Grown-ups understand the importance of privacy; kids stick it all on Facebook. The analogy extends to Wolf and the Sunlight Project, who publish vast troves of data online without discrimination, as opposed to Tom and Leila at the Denver Independent, who publish only what they believe serves the public interest and only after rigorous fact-checking and corroboration of sources.

Franzen is well known for his rants about the assault on privacy in the digital age. Is the author himself not in danger of groping after a kind of purity here? Is this just polemic dressed up as fiction? If it is, then, as Franzen has argued elsewhere, it would be in violation of the contract with the reader that there be "no bait-and-switch going on, no instruction masquerading as entertainment".

Sometimes he does appear to violate the terms. The supermodel interns who float around Wolf's Bolivian base are painted with pretty broad strokes, as are the Occupy radicals who boast about their commitment to solidarity but won't share their beer. Late in the book, we meet a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who records every moment of his life so that he can live forever as data in the cloud. The character is already ridiculous, but Franzen also makes him a gun-happy paedophile.

Ultimately, however, Franzen the novelist trumps Franzen the polemicist. No argument is allowed to win; nobody escapes complicity; nobody is pure. The very idea that we need to toughen up and keep secrets is undermined by the way the story is being told: as a reading experience,

Purity

is all about the revelation of secrets. That's the contract: you keep reading, you get to find out. The old pleasure of trafficking in forbidden knowledge has not diminished.

Purity
by Jonathan Franzen
(Fourth Estate $36.99, out on Tuesday)

- Canvas, Telegraph