Superstar writer reading: "Purity" by Jonathan Franzen

On 18 October, along with some 1500 other people, I went to the Bozar concert hall in Brussels, to see the latest crowd-pulling international star packing them in the course of a European tour. No, not Barenboim; not Yo-Yo Ma either, but superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen. He who has been said to embody The Great American Novelist. 

For an American writer to pack out an event in a major concert hall, in a city where English is not even the national language, is fair evidence of his status, and indeed, after we had all endured  a rather embarrassing and unnecessary introduction from Flemish writer Saskia De Coster, Franzen delivered for the fans, answering questions from interviewer Annelies Beck (who, by contrast, did a great job) and from the audience with dry and witty aplomb. He also read two extracts from Purity, one relating the purloining of a nuclear missile for the purposes of enhanced sexual gratification in a trashy Texan relationship, the other a conversation between leading character, Tom Aberant, and his former wife, Anabel Laird, aka Penelope Tyler, in the course of which he is persuaded via a rambling, disconnected exchange to go to visit her (something they, and we, know to be a terrible idea). The latter extract in particular showed off Franzen's extraordinary talent for combining great emotional depth with painful but laugh-out-loud comedy. As it happens, I saw this same extract cited by Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, who did a recent Lunch with the FT interview with Franzen, as having left her "slack-jawed with admiration", but wondering "what his ex-wife would have made of it".

I have remarked on those Franzen sentences before, the ones that stop you in your tracks with admiration for the sheer skill with which he employs language. Purity offers many such moments, though - and I can bring no hard statistics to the table on this - perhaps not with the sheer number of them as we saw in The Corrections or in Freedom. This novel felt just slightly more concerned with the story, in slightly more of a hurry to get on with it, and in fact I was surprised at the speed I was turning the pages, especially in the earlier parts of the novel. Of course, this is still a long book, and a correspondingly long read, but somehow it felt just slightly less effortful than the two previous blockbusters.


But what is it actually all about? I suppose, like the two previous books, this is a novel which takes on the current state of humanity. Yes, it's a big theme, but big themes are what Franzen does. On the surface, the story follows the attempts of a young Californian graduate, the "clever, lovably sarcastic" (Lucy Kellaway's words) Pip Tyler, to get to the bottom of her own identity. This mainly means finding out who her father is, something which her possessive, needy, genuinely loving, and frankly rather nutty mother steadfastly refuses to reveal. Her search, which develops through a series of apparently extraordinary coincidences, brings her into contact with characters who are actually more at the centre of Franzen's concerns than Pip herself: Andreas Wolf, a German internet activist dedicated to exposing the secrets of the powerful through his Bolivia-based "Sunlight" project, and Tom Aberant, a journalist who runs an online investigative journalism operation out of Denver, Colorado. In the course of her peregrinations, Pip works for both men, and, in different ways, becomes close to both, without fully penetrating the mystery of either man.

Franzen drawn by the FT

It is significant that both men ply their trade using the internet, though in very different ways. Andreas is in the business of the large scale data-dump. He hacks into his targets' systems and publishes what he obtains unfiltered and unmoderated. He is repeated and explicitly likened to Julian Assange. Tom is more traditional, working, in particular with his partner Leila, according to old-fashioned journalistic standards, to put together exposé stories on the machinations of the great and powerful, stories, which, though, see the light of day online. Ostensibly, their ultimate aims might seem quite similar, but the difference in the methodologies is crucial, not least in how Franzen presents the inner lives of these two characters.

As ever it is far from simple. Tom is arguably simpler, a writer and journalist whose life is to a large degree defined by a mutually destructive and frankly unhinged relationship (and marriage) with refusenik heiress, Anabel Laird. However crazy she may be, Franzen does a typically excellent job of showing how an apparently balanced individual can be willingly drawn in, and how, wherever our sympathies lie, it takes two to dysfunction this dramatically. Tom escapes (provisionally) and finds refuge in his work, his online investigative journalism being a salvation and a stay of execution. 

For Andreas, the picture is further complexified by history. He grows up in the German Democratic Republic, a rebel protected by his parents' political status and connections, who, when the Wall comes down, achieves celebrity status during the sacking of the Stasi archives. The fact that his motives for wanting to trash the Stasi files are misconstrued is just the first of many mismatches between the motives attributed to him and what really drives him. In the new post Cold War world, he becomes a internet activist, surrounded by hordes of uncritical (generally young and female) helpers, reclusively undermining the secrets of others as an almost god-like power-broker of the internet. At the same time, ironically, he too harbours a secret, known only to two others in the world, which he will go to extreme lengths to protect - a source of cognitive dissonance which drives this character to his destiny.

The internet is a major theme of the novel. Franzen has courted controversy with what are perceived as hostile views to the internet and perhaps to technology more widely. (There is, for example, a famous anti-iPod, iPhone, iWhatever rant in Freedom.) Franzen is however much too clever to be simplistic about this. The texting, Facebook and Instagram habits of young Pip are just a way of life. Tom's online Denver Independent is a force for good. But on the whole the Internet comes to seem pernicious as a consequence of its all-encompassing, ubiquitous nature. It has become impossible not to live "in relation to" the internet. Even Pip's mother, who has opted for the simplest and most reclusive of existences, cannot escape its clutches and the exposure it brings. For most, it is a daily factor in life, the environment in which we live, whether we are aware of it or not. It is left to Andreas, who has lived in the totalitarian utopia of East Germany, to make an explicit connection: the internet has become a kind of totalitarian system. You can embrace it, you can refuse it, but you can't avoid it, nor avoid having it set the terms of your existence. Maybe there are no party chairman setting five year plans, but there are high priests such as Andreas who ensure that its reach and its consequences touch everyone, with all the effects this can have. And indeed, that is what happens in Purity. The power of the internet is revealed in the interconnectedness of all the apparently disparate events in the story. It is a book of parallels and hidden connections.

Fear not though, it is a big theme of the novel, but this is no mere technophobic rant. As ever, what Franzen is looking at more generally is the human condition at this point in time. And also as ever, his main tool in doing so is an extraordinary perceptiveness as to human relations and motivations. It is impossible to read this book without periodically being brought up short by the sheer ability of this writer to encapsulate a thought, a reasoning or a motivation in a sentence. 

No-one with the profile and reach of Jonathan Franzen is ever going to escape criticism. His status means that his novels will inevitably provide the focus for agendas of all sorts. He has been attacked for his portrayals of female characters (= misogyny?), for not portraying black characters, for Luddism and technophobia... Possibly there is some truth in some of this, but I can't help wondering is it is actually wrong for a writer - however gifted - to write about the world he knows and understands best. The world of largely white, middle class America, here with forays into Germany and an internet colony in South America, with its stresses and fault lines, its neuroses and externalities, is the one Franzen knows best, and he is unsurpassed in his ability to portray it. Purity proves that point again. 

So yes, a Great American Novelist. Isn't that enough?

The famous Time cover