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May 16, 2016danielestes rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
There aren't many authors whose books I automatically read without regard to buzz or reviews. Jonathan Franzen is one of the few. His ability to compose devastatingly intimate moments, using a prose so concise that I often forget I'm reading at all, is what draws me to his stories again and again. I didn't warm up to Purity as easily as I did to Freedom or The Corrections (my hands-down Franzen favorite) but the book was still leagues ahead of nearly everything else I was reading at the time. The story centers on the young, twentysomething Purity "Pip" Tyler who is insufferably naive right from the go. But before you decide to give up on her entirely you meet her roommates, who are all semi-illegally squatting in the same house, and her mother, who's a damaged piece of work on her own, and suddenly Pip is the sanest, most levelheaded person in the room. Like most of us starting out in life, Pip wants to find a solid foothold in this complex, scary world. Her path though is about to get a whole lot murkier when she meets the seductive international visionary Andreas Wolf. If you can't tolerate your characters being endlessly amoral long past the point where you'd feel sorry for them, then Purity probably isn't for you. Nor is anything Franzen-related for that matter.