Purity, Jonathan Franzen’s long-awaited new novel, is an unwieldy mess, with only a handful of gems buried beneath layers of the dullest and drabbest material imaginable.
Here, Franzen pulls a surprise. Instead of taking us to Bolivia, we go back in time to the “Republic of Bad Taste,” otherwise known as East Germany during the 1980s, the last decade of the communist regime. This proves an inspired choice; we meet a young Wolf, “whose embarrassment it was to be the megalomaniacal antithesis of a dictatorship too ridiculous to be worthy of megalomania.” Although Franzen gets bogged down showing us how strange and clinging Wolf’s mother was during his childhood (the overbearing yet needy mother is a recurring theme here), he also thrusts the adult Wolf into a possibly doomed romantic relationship, a ghastly crime, and an apparently fateful meeting with an American named Tom.
By Jonathan Franzen (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
