Plot summary
The novel tells the intersecting stories of various people, with the major themes involving Germany during the Cold War, the age of Wikileaks and other exposers of government secrets, and one woman's gradual realization of who her biological father is.
Purity in Oakland
Purity Tyler, who goes by the name "Pip," is 23 and has $130,000 in student-loan debt. She was raised by her reclusive mother Penelope in Felton, California, in the Santa Cruz mountains, south of the Bay Area. The two have a unique and co-dependent relationship, with her mother refusing to tell Pip anything about her father or even her previous life, including Penelope's real name and age. Pip works as a telemarketer for a company selling dubious green-energy schemes; she lives in a communal, squat rent-free house because of her secret love for a married man named Stephen. After impressing one of the visitors to the squat, a beautiful German anti-nuclear activist, Annagret, she is recruited for The Sunshine Project, a fictional competitor to WikiLeaks, headquartered in Bolivia and run by a man named Andreas Wolf. Pip is uninterested in joining the project, but, after she makes a romantic advance on Stephen, who rejects her because he thinks of her as a daughter figure, Pip decides to leave the house and her job. After asking her mother a final time to help her meet her father so she can try to get him to help with her student loans, Pip decides to go to work for Andreas Wolf, who Annagret has said is capable of tracking down her father.
The Republic of Bad Taste
In 1987, Andreas Wolf is 27 and living in East Germany, where he acts as a youth councillor for a church, routinely having sex with the teenaged girls he councils. When one of the girls refuses to have sex with him in the church, he brings her to his estranged parents' dacha where he is caught by local police and told never to return. Andreas falls into bitterness. Sometime later, he meets a troubled 15-year-old, Annagret, who is spending her nights at the church because her stepfather has begun sexually abusing her. As her mother is a nurse who's addicted to drugs and has been stealing them and her stepfather, Horst, is a low-level Stasi informant, Annagret does not feel that she can report the abuse because one or both of her parents will be imprisoned, thus ruining her life. Andreas does not know what to do to protect Annagret, and offers to kill Horst. She is initially dismissive of the idea but, after a few days, changes her mind. Andreas tells Annagret to lure her stepfather to his parents' dacha, and he reminisces about his childhood.
Born to an English literature professor and a high-level official in the East German government, he is indulged as a child due to his parents' status, his intelligence, and his good looks. But, as he grows older, he realizes that his life is a facade. His mother suffers bouts of depression and is also sexually promiscuous. When Andreas is a teenager, he is sent to a psychiatrist, ostensibly due to his excessive masturbation. In reality, Andreas is suffering from depression after a "ghost" approached him and told him that he was Andreas' actual father, a former graduate student of his mother's with whom she had a long affair. Andreas continues to act like a perfect child, but, at age 20, he begins to write poetry. When a poem of his is published which contains an obscene and treasonous acrostic, he is protected by his parents, but warned that he must either complete the army service he has been avoiding or become estranged from them. Andreas chooses estrangement.
Back in 1987, Andreas went through with the killing of Annagret's stepfather. He is surprised when his crime is not discovered, but he eventually comes to believe that his father is protecting him.
Two years later, as the Berlin Wall is about to come down and Wolf is afraid that his crime will be exposed when the Stasi files are unsealed, Andreas approaches his father and arranges for one last favor from the party. Wolf gets access to his Stasi records and those of Annagret's stepfather. While trying to leave the building with those records, he is almost caught before he runs into television cameras and denounces the government, thereby quickly becoming a celebrity dissident, shining "sunlight" on the state's secrets. He then meets an American journalist, Tom Aberant.
Leila Helou is a 52-year-old investigative journalist for the Denver Independent, an online newspaper. Chasing down a story in Texas, she finds herself missing Pip Tyler, who works as an intern for the "D.I." and who brought Leila the story. Leila is still married to her now-paraplegic husband, a creative writing professor, Charles Blenheim, but she's also is in a long-term relationship with the "D.I.'s" founder and editor Tom Aberant. Enthralled by Pip and thinking of her as the daughter she never had, Leila presses Tom into expanding her role and salary. However, as Tom gets enthralled with Pip himself and offers to let her live with him and Leila, Leila becomes jealous of Pip and begins to think that she and her husband are lovers.
After returning from a work trip, Leila accuses Tom of wanting to leave her for Pip, and is shocked when he reveals that he has discovered that Pip's mother is his ex-wife Anabel, and that he believes he's Pip's father.
Moonglow Dairy
Pip goes to work in Bolivia, which she loves, but is dismayed by the bizarre hierarchy at The Sunshine Project where status is determined by proximity to Andreas Wolf. Andreas pursues Pip sexually, claiming to be falling in love with her and even telling her about the murder of Annagret's stepfather Horst. Although they have sexual encounters, Pip refuses to have intercourse with him. At the end of six months, Andreas tells Pip that it is impossible to track down her father, and suggests that her skills lie in investigative journalism. He sends her to Denver because Tom is the only other person who knows about Horst's murder. Wolf has Pip install spyware in the "D.I." offices and at Tom's home.
Pip comes to genuinely enjoy working at the Denver Independent with Tom and Leila and, realizing that they don't seem to have any agenda regarding Wolf, so she regrets having installed spyware on Tom's computer. After Andreas tells her that he is no longer interested in her sexually, she threatens him and asks him to undo the spyware. Shortly after that, Tom fires her after he locates the spyware and realizes that she is an agent sent by Andreas. He interrogates her as to the identity of her father, but, as she seems to know nothing, he lets her go.
[le1o9n8a0rd]
In the '90s when Tom Aberant is divorced from his wife Anabel Laird, he finds himself engaging in sex with her repeatedly. Flashing back to their courtship, Tom Aberant remembers when he was a college student at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Following an unflattering story about an art student at the Tyler School of Art, Anabel Laird, Tom, who is still a virgin, falls in love with the difficult and precocious Anabel. She comes from a wealthy family worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but refuses any of the family fortune. Much to Tom's mother's dismay, Tom decides to marry Anabel. Their marriage quickly becomes abusive, as Anabel descends into anorexia and isolates Tom from members of his family and his own friends, and does her best to punish him for his journalistic success.
When Tom's mother Clelia reveals that she is dying, Tom travels with her to East Germany, where she is briefly reunited with the family she abandoned. Tom's mother dies there and East Germany crumbles. On the day that Andreas appears on television, Tom also happens to meet him and is quickly enchanted by him. After Tom reveals that he wants to leave Anabel after 11 years together, Andreas confesses to Horst's murder and persuades Tom to help him remove Horst's body and rebury in a different location. When they are finished reburying the body, Andreas masturbates on the grave, leaving Tom unsettled. He then leaves East Germany without meeting Andreas again.
Tom returns to America and divorces Anabel, though he continues having sex with her. Finally, to end their relationship, he tells her that he is going to accept a huge check from her father. She disappears, leaving no trace, except for a taunting note. Though Anabel's brothers believe that he has killed her, he remains on good terms with her father. He does not take money from him while he is alive, but when her father dies in 2003, Tom accepts $20,000,000 to fund his own publication.
The Killer
After Tom helps Andreas bury the body, Wolf gets back together with Annagret. She and Wolf's mother Katya become the best of friends, and Wolf finds himself experiencing great internal rage, which he dubs "the killer."
After ten years of lovelessness together, Andreas leaves Annagret after his mother claims that Annagret is in love with another woman. He becomes an internet celebrity and a wanted man in most countries of the world for his leaking of secrets, and eventually bases his operations in a hidden paradise within Bolivia. In his growing paranoia, he endlessly searches for information about himself, and when a journalist, Leila Helou, castigates him for "dirty secrets," he connects her with Tom Aberant, who he is convinced has betrayed him. Seeking revenge, he discovers that Tom's wife vanished long ago, so he starts a deep trawl with face-recognition software on American databases. Eventually, he discovers Penelope Tyler (Anabel's new name) and, learning of Pip's existence and about Tom being her likely father, he asks Annagret to recruit Pip.
When Tom finally learns that he has been spied on, he travels to Bolivia to have it out with Wolf, who is surprised to learn that Tom has kept his secret. Wolf leads Tom to a high, isolated cliff and taunts Tom with his knowledge about Pip and his having read Tom's secret memoir. When he can't goad Tom into killing him, even by telling him that he has mailed the secret memoir to Pip, Wolf leaps off the cliff.
The Rain Comes
Pip is trying to come to terms with the knowledge of who she is. She reveals herself to her mother's trust-fund manager, whose hands are mostly tied if Anabel does not sign a release document. Pip convinces her mother to dip into the huge fund to pay off some important bills, and arranges for Tom to meet Anabel again after 25 years. The reunion goes very badly. The novel ends with Pip and her boyfriend Jason sitting in a car outside of Anabel's cabin, listening to a furious argument between Tom and Anabel. Pip has hope that she might be able to do better than her parents did in their relationship.
Reception
The novel garnered high praise [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] from some and negative [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] reviews from others, with Nick Patch stating that the debates centered on Franzen himself. [16] The novelist told Toronto Star , "So, people with a lot of time on their hands and no real interest in what is true think I’m a bad person — So what? It’s not going to end my career.” [17] Michiko Kakutani's review in The New York Times was favorable, [18] calling the book "dynamic" and dubbing it Franzen's "most intimate novel yet." Harper's described the novel's plot as a "beautiful arabesque," and suggests that Franzen seems to have responded to past accusations of anti-feminist chauvinism with blunt clichés. [19]
Darlena Cunha said the novel "only serves to criticize young feminists who use the Internet and dare to stand up to convention. [...] In Purity, Franzen equates masculinity with power, money, logic, and cruel thinking. But when these traits lead his male protagonists down sordid paths, the blame falls on the women — the crazy mothers, the crazy wives, the vulnerable girls." [17] A review of the book in The Economist magazine stated Purity did not compare favorably with his previous works. It stated that the book "feels like an imitation of Mr. Franzen's earlier novels, without the emotional resonance and subtlety." [20]
In a June 2018 profile of Franzen in The New York Times Magazine, Purity was revealed to have been a relative commercial disappointment compared to Franzen's two previous novels. According to the article, Purity has only sold 255,476 copies to date since its release in 2015, compared to 1.15 million copies of Freedom sold since its publication in 2010, and 1.6 million copies of The Corrections sold since its publication in 2001. [21]
Planned television series
In 2016, Daily Variety reported that the novel was in the process of being adapted into a 20-hour limited series for Showtime by Todd Field who would share writing duties with Franzen and the playwright Sir David Hare. It would star Daniel Craig as Andreas Wolf and be executive produced by Field, Franzen, Craig, Hare and Scott Rudin. [22]
However, in a February 2018 interview with The Times London, Hare said that, given the budget for Field's adaptation ($170 million), he doubted it would ever be made, but added "It was one of the richest and most interesting six weeks of my life, sitting in a room with Todd Field, Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Craig bashing out the story. They're extremely interesting people." [23]
In June 2018, The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Franzen that reported him receiving a phone call from series writer/director Todd Field to give the news that pre-production on the series had been halted. Star Daniel Craig also called to explain that he had "been summoned" to star in another James Bond movie. [24] In 2017, The Hollywood Reporter quoted Showtime CEO David Nevins as saying that after Craig's commitment to the 25th James Bond movie, the Purity adaptation was still on track. "He's doing Bond first and I can't say anything about what I know or don't know about Bond, [but] It's possible it may not shoot until 2019." [25] Field, however, would later debunk these rumors; "I think there was a polite— words that were said, 'Oh you know, it was a Bond thing that came up,' but that wasn't true," he said in 2023. "It was just that the network just didn't want to spend what the three of us thought needed to be spent to make the thing that we spent a year of our lives on." While regretting that he couldn't successfully get the project off the ground, Field said he would not return to it: "We could never go back to it now because it would feel cheap as if we were being opportunistic instead of being prophetic." [26]
