Purity. By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 576 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; £20.
“THE reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator,” Jonathan Franzen, an American novelist, has said. Following this rule, he has written two exceptional books that bring readers deep into the lives of troubled Midwestern families. “The Corrections”, about grown-up children home for Christmas, won a National Book Award in 2001, and “Freedom”, about a troubled marriage in the George Bush era, was even more emotionally deft and haunting.
“Purity”, his latest novel, follows a now-familiar formula, tracing the interlocking lives and personal musings of a cast of broken characters. The protagonist Pip, whose real name is Purity, is a lost young woman with $130,000 in student loans, searching for the identity of her father. Like Pip in Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, she evolves from innocent to worldly wise through a novel full of twists and unlikely coincidences. Pip moves from Oakland to Bolivia to be an intern for Andreas Wolf, a German internet activist who runs the Sunlight Project, a...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hDep1Y
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