Test Driving Novels, In This Case “Purity”

I enjoy reading short stories in The New Yorker and then commenting on them – if and when I think I have anything to say. But some New Yorker stories are not really stand-alone fiction. Rather, they are excerpts from forthcoming novels.

For instance, back in March, I wrote about “Sweetness,” a story by Toni Morrison that was taken from her novel “God Help the Child,”  published soon thereafter. In that case, I wasn’t focused on sampling the book, but rather on the story's take on racial prejudice. 

 

Jonathan Fanzen, often hailed as the latest Great American Novelist, recently published “Purity,” a sweeping, 563-page tale of personal angst, inter-personal strife and great events. Reviews have been generally positive, but clearly, this isn’t a book for everyone.

For instance, The Washington Post had this to say: “Franzen’s novels have never been appropriate Mother’s Day presents. But the matriarchs in this one are particularly toxic, an encyclopedia of Oedipal horrors: grasping, seductive, delusional, trumpeting their ‘moral victimhood.’ Not that fathers get a pass — they abandon and abuse children, too — but somehow the guys inspire nothing like the blistering rage these mothers do.”

And, the review continued: “Everybody harbors secrets: shameful, disgusting, sometimes deadly secrets.”

Does it sound like it might be a good Christmas present – to yourself, anyway?

Well, you can test drive this book by reading a story called “The Republic of Bad Taste” in the June 8 & 15, 2015, annual fiction  issue of The New Yorker. This piece is actually an excerpt from “Purity” although the magazine didn’t then identify it as such. In it, readers get the back story of one of the novel’s main characters, an East German dissident named Andreas Wolf who, after the collapse of the Communist regime, goes on to become a Julian Assange-like figure, running an Internet operation similar to WikiLeaks.

Eventually a young woman named Purity (who calls herself Pip) connects with Wolf in the hope that his investigative expertize can help her find the father she has never known.

The excerpt, longer than most New Yorker short stories at almost 20 pages, is an interesting if less than totally convincing read. While credible as a stand-alone piece, potential readers probably won’t be surprised to learn that the ending is less than satisfactory. But that seems to be a hallmark of a significant chunk of New Yorker fiction. Many such stories appear to lack resolution.

On the plus style, readers can get a good taste of Franzen’s prose style, how he handles his characters and now he puts fictional people and events in real-life settings. While it is not my thing, you might find yourself agreeing with Slate’s Laura Miller who described “Purity” as “a limber, untroubled, deliciously fluent piece of fiction.”