A Little Dickens

“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen, 2015

Franzen is a middle-class novelist that explicitly says he writes about families and individual psychology, not politics.  Apoliticism is de rigeur for bourgeois wits as you might already know.  In that he is not far different than other mainstream U.S. fiction writers like John Updike and Saul Bellow.   He is one of the present darlings of the New York literary world.  That should make you queasy…

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

This work is almost comically bad.  We have a Cinderella story about a poor girl Purity, aka “Pip,” who discovers she is a billionaire.  We have another Dicken’s-like touch, where an unknown father and unknown daughter are reunited by unbelievable means. Even Purity’s nickname ‘Pip’ conjures up Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations.’  Then there is a ridiculous suicide.  We have constant digs at the left – squatters in Oakland, Occupy, internet leakers like Assange, class-knowledgeable writers like Steinbeck and Dos Passos, the East German workers’ state, vegetarianism – hell, everything a comfortable bore dislikes. 

Maybe he thinks he’s the new Dickens.  He’s not.  Dickens was not a revolutionary writer, but he criticized wealth in stories like "A Christmas Carol," and paid attention to the lives of the poor, child labor and class.  For instance "Little Dorrit" has scenes in a prison.  For his time, Dickens was a reformer and this is no surprise, as he himself came from below.  Franzen takes the most improbable parts of Dickens while ignoring his politics.

Over its 700-plus pages it limps along describing two really messed up women – Anabel and her daughter Purity/Pip, while adding a few more along the way.  Anabel is heir to billions yet attempts to become an art-house filmmaker and fails at it.  The key issue here is her ‘purist’ rejection of the billions.  I have to think that Franzen sees the craziness of both mother and daughter as rooted in this fact.  Rejecting money is the root of all evil!  The book also reflects a somewhat Updikian view of women.  Purity is sarcastic, a sexual tease, prone to uncontrolled emotional outbursts – someone you might want to avoid.  Her disturbed mother Anabel becomes a hermit in the San Francisco hills, living in a cabin and working at a grocery store as a clerk after being left by her husband Tom.  Tom had had enough of fighting - her emotional outbursts, constant discussions and blaming, while missing the fact that their last sexual encounter had included an intentionally-punctured condom.  Anabel never tells Pip about her father, and there is the story – the search for the father.  Another classic orphan story, like 'Oliver Twist.'  

Along the way is the development of an East German dissident from his Communist Party parents, Andreas, who becomes the new Assange running a ‘Sunlight Project.’  Andreas also becomes involved in a somewhat justified criminal enterprise and the guilt that follows him throughout the book is somewhat unexplainable.  Franzen has a conflicted relationship with technology and that incoherence is on display in the book, especially related to Andreas who he relentlessly dislikes. Franzen famously derided both Oprah and the internet in recent years.  The inclusion of his first book, “The Corrections,” in Oprah’s pop book club made him wince.  It shouldn’t have. It belonged there. 

Sexual obsession actually provides the emotional heart of the book.  The men in the book, especially Andreas, have terrible erotic jones’ for ‘beautiful’ younger women.  This might remind us of the tradition of English professors lusting after their coeds in U.S. fiction.  Franzen does not teach at a university but he might as well have.

I read it so you don’t have to.

Other reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Freedom” (by Franzen too); "Consider the Lobster" and "The Pale King" (both by DF Wallace); "American Pastorale" (Roth).

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

Red Frog

September 23, 2019