PURITY by Jonathan Franzen

I wavered between four and five stars in my opinion of this book.  On the one hand, it was overly long, but, on the other hand, I loved the way everything came together in the end.  The lives of the three main characters—Pip Tyler, Andreas Wolf, and Tom Aberant--are very intertwined, and, little by little, Franzen clues us in as to how their lives happen to intersect.  In other words, the plot unspools perfectly, in my opinion.  Andreas Wolf is a charismatic uncoverer of truths, a la Julian Assange, and has a dark secret that he shares with both Tom and Pip.  Pip is a twenty-something in a dead-end job with crushing student loan debts, but her main goal in life is to find out who her father is.  She doesn’t even know her mother’s real name, as her mother completely changed her identity around the time Pip was born in order to ensure that Pip’s father never discovered his daughter’s existence.  In fact, mothers figure largely in this book, as Andreas and Tom also have moms who become characters in their own right in this novel.   I found Tom to be the most enigmatic and least developed of the three main characters, perhaps because he seems the most normal, ironically, despite bearing a last name that seems to be a misspelling of “aberrant.”   His girlfriend Leila has her own chapter as well and lives part-time with her novelist husband, Charles, who hilariously laments that many lauded novelists these days bear the name Jonathan and write ridiculously long novels.  As always, Franzen’s prose is superb.  My favorite line comes when Tom is describing an early meeting with his future wife, Anabel, at an art gallery.  She “came clad in a black-trimmed crimson cashmere coat and strong opinions.”  For me, the part about the opinions is a compliment, although the coat doesn’t sound too bad, either.