A rollicking satire on the way we live now

Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series of lampoons of writers expected to produce ‘big books’, writers named Jonathan and an assortment of other self-referential gags, but also the fact that its eponymous heroine, Purity Tyler, is nicknamed Pip. This Pip’s expectations are played off against those of Franzen’s readers: she won’t get what she expects, of course, any more than Dickens’s original Pip did. But to a great extent, our expectations will be met: this is a ‘big book’, a rollicking, sharply observed contemporary satire of family life and cultural politics.

There are other burdens for our heroine beyond her highly charged names: she also has $130,000 of college debt and an emotionally demanding, apparently unstable mother, who lives in seclusion and refuses to tell Pip anything about her family, including who her father is. Pip lives with Marxist protestors, squatters and a kind-hearted paranoid schizophrenic in a house that once would have been described as countercultural, but now is probably just alt-cultural. A transient German woman named Annagret offers Pip an opportunity to intern for Andreas Wolf, a famous digital provocateur in the style of Julian Assange (cast as an off-stage rival, and thoroughly skewered), who promises the purity of radical digital transparency by leaking dirty secrets. Hoping that Wolf’s hackers might locate her father, Pip agrees to join the demagogue at the Sunlight Project, a setup that mostly resembles a summer camp for nubile hacker Girl Fridays in the Bolivian rainforest.

Why someone of Wolf’s global fame is interested in Pip is the suspense driving Franzen’s increasingly elaborate and ultimately absurd plot. There are flashes back to Wolf’s youth in East Berlin, where he was the arrogant, brilliant, pampered son of apparatchiks, including an(other) unstable mother.