Purity (Franzen) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Mr. Franzen's most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet.... The stories of the characters in Purity zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen's determination to build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence.... Mr. Franzen adroitly dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain.... Mr. Franzen has added a new octave to his voice.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Purity is a novel of plenitude and panorama.... [Its sprawl] can suggest a sort of openness and can have a strange, insistent way of pulling us in, holding our attention.... Often brilliantly funny.... This is a novel of secrets, manipulations and lies.
Colm Toibin - New York Times Book Review


Purity demonstrates Franzen's ingenious plotting, his ability to steer the chaos of real life toward moments that feel utterly surprising yet inevitable.... In Purity Franzen writes with a perfectly balanced fluency . . . From its tossed-off observations...to its thoughtful reflections on the moral compromises of journalism, Purity offers a constantly provocative series of insights.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


As in all Franzen's novels, and now so very powerfully in Purity, it is the history of his players that matters. Franzen's exhaustive exploration of their motives, charted oftentimes over decades so as to deliver us to this moment when the plot turns on the past in the seemingly smallest of ways, is what makes him such a fine writer, and his books important. He is a fastidious portrait artist and an epic muralist at once.
Bret Lott - Boston Globe


Purity is the best book the prodigiously talented novelist has written--funnier, looser, with more care for his characters.... Purity offers the sense of ease of a virtuoso giving every appearance of enjoying himself.
Yvonne Zipp - Christian Science Monitor


[Purity is] so funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent, there's never a moment you wish you were reading something else. Franzen still seems on every page of this book like America's most significant working novelist.
Charles Finch - Chicago Tribune


[Purity displays] fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we all must come to terms.... It remains compelling to read Franzen confront his demons, which are not just his but everyone's.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times


Franzen may well now be the best American novelist. He has certainly become our most public one, not because he commands Oprah's interest and is a sovereign presence on the best-seller list—though neither should be discounted—but because, like the great novelists of the past, he convinces us that his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live.... A good writer will make an effort to purge his prose of cliches. But it takes genius to reanimate them in all their original power and meaning.
Sam Tanenhaus - New Republic


Purity comes five years after Freedom and 14 years after The Corrections. Both earlier novels were called masterpieces of American fiction; to say the same of Purity might be true but misses the point. Magisterial sweep is now just what Franzen does, and his new novel appears...as a simple, enjoyable reminder of his sharp-eyed presence.
Radhika Jones - Time


Franzen's prose is alive with intelligence.... [T]he ride is exhilarating.
Caleb Crain - Atlantic


Purity's plot is a beautiful arabesque.... Subplots are doubled and trebled. But the remarkable thing is that the novel does not seem convoluted when you're reading it; to an astonishing degree, the melodramatic swoops of the plot are well orchestrated and thrilling.
Elaine Blair - Harper's


As with all of Franzen's fiction, there is much to admire in Purity, not least what reviewer David Gates once termed a "microfelicities," the expertly calibrated turns of phrase and pleasingly digressive cultural references and riffs around every corner. Like his last two novels, Purity bends time, easing in and out of characters' pasts and presents until, before you know it, the disparate pieces of a life suddenly fit.
Leigh Haber - O Magazine


[Franzen] knows exactly what we've come to expect from him, yet with Purity, imperfect and impolite but, yes, ambitious and vital, he proves us all wrong.
Richard Dorment - Esquire


Secrets are power, and power corrupts even the most idealistic in Franzen's exhaustive bildungsroman.... Franzen's greatest strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web.... Though the novel lacks resonance, its pieces fit together with stunning craftsmanship.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Does anyone have truly pure intentions, or are most people motivated by their own needs and desires? This is one of the questions posed by Franzen in his provocative new novel, a book rich with characters searching for roots and meaning in a world of secrets and lies. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal


Franzen has created a spectacularly engrossing and provocative twenty-first-century improvisation on Charles Dickens' masterpiece, Great Expectations.... Purity will be one of the most talked about books of the season. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


(Starred review.) A twisty but controlled epic that merges large and small concerns.... And yet the novel's prose never bogs down into lectures.... An expansive, brainy, yet inviting novel that leaves few foibles unexplored.
Kirkus Reviews