![]() ![]() The downside: there’s a certain sameness to the. the experience of reading Purity is as propulsive as that of reading The Corrections and Freedom (2010). Purity is published by 4th Estate (£8.99). Franzen’s prose is alive with intelligence, and on the first page of his new novel, Purity, a reader can see his mind at work on a task at which he excels: showing the way people think. That said, this is a book in which there is much to admire and more to enjoy. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the. But when he is not writing dialogue, the conceits he deploys in his prose can occasionally feel strained and imprecise – as demonstrated by some of the more preposterous plot twists and the novel’s rather broad, and sometimes clumsy, satire. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. ![]() Pip’s mother is vividly and memorably realised, and Franzen has a gift for capturing the tics that characterise different patterns of speech. The resulting novel is vast, rambling, entertaining and funny. With all of this in place, Franzen introduces a clutch of related narratives that transport us to a variety of places – among them East Berlin and the Bolivian rainforest. As Pip is about to embark on the search for her father, a beautiful German woman she lives with offers to secure her an internship with a WikiLeaks-type organisation run by a Julian Assange-type figure named Andreas Wolf, who might be able to help her solve the twin problems of her insolvency and her identity. ![]()
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