Purity

Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate, 576pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50) DEPENDING ON where you're coming from, Jonathan Franzen is either the latest Great American Novelist, or a sexist white male dinosaur, according to reviewers of his latest novel, Purity. ‘Franzen has become a difficult writer to review,' reflected Benjamin Markovits in the Independent. ‘The praise and the reaction against the praise have become so extreme that you end up bouncing back and forth between them.'

‘The novel follows a now-familiar formula, tracing the interlocking lives of a cast of broken characters,' according to the Economist's reviewer. ‘The protagonist Pip, whose real name is Purity, is a lost young woman 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 to Bolivia to be an intern for Andreas Wolf, a German internet activist who runs the Sunlight Project, a non-profit [organisation] that exposes political and social misdeeds.' Many other reviewers were struck by the Dickensian parallels, Sarah Sands in the Evening Standard seeing the novel as ‘a kind of Netflix version of Great Expectations'.

‘Franzen's large theme is the impossibility of living a life of ideological purity,' explained Elaine Showalter in Prospect. ‘He examines the conflicts between philosophic ideals and human nature, between the contemporary gathering and dumping of unmediated secret information online, and principled investigative journalism.'

David Sexton, also writing in the Standard, found Purity ‘makes the most compelling reading'. However, in the

New Statesman Lionel Shriver was ambivalent. Franzen's prose was ‘inviting, accessible, clear and well crafted', but ultimately the novel was ‘a skilful execution of a weak idea'.

Jenni Russell in the Times, however, found no redeeming features: the novel was ‘tripe'. ‘His characters remain obstinately flat and implausible. Franzen keeps inventing marriages where dutiful men subsume their own wishes to those of their neurotic partners before finally walking out.'

Curtis Sittenfeld in the Guardian summed up the critics' mixed reactions: ‘On the one hand, I'm disinclined to recommend this book to my female friends; on the other hand, if I'd been told Purity was a first novel by an unknown writer I'd be dazzled by its rich scenes and crackling dialogue, its delicious observations about contemporary life.'