My favorite book I've read this year. It meanders all over the globe, but all the loose ends come together in a way that is both satisfying and open-ended. Each character is unique and complex if sometimes inscrutable.

Franzen shows that he's an out of touch, and, ultimately, overshadowed writer. The Corrections was decent enough, but this just smacks of trying to stay relevant, by using buzzwords but failing to understand their meanings properly.

I adore Jonathan Franzen's style of writing. He just knows how to weave a story full of well thought out characters & interesting themes. Highly recommended.

tl;dr Girls are bad (unless a guy is having sex with them, and then only in the particular way that guy wants to have sex).

I listened to this monstrous travesty so you wouldn't have to.

25 hours. That's how long this book is in audio form. I'm trying to imagine how any editing of this book actually happened.

Editor: "Maybe you should think about spending less time talking about how much the East German guy despises his mother and then has sex with teenagers?"
Franzen: "Mm, no."
Editor: "OK."

Franzen also goes on and on and on about how horrible the title character's mother is and how much her ex-husband hates her (in the section in the middle of the book that's written in first-person). He also spends many many pages on how insufferable said character is, presumably because her mother was insane and behaved like a spoiled seven-year-old.

Within these hundreds of pages are maybe three significant events. You could summarize the plot in a paragraph if you wouldn't have to take a detour to talk about the East German guy and his parents. It's a parade of human insanity. I can't even with the woman who can't have sex without foreplay that involves a stuffed bull, and who counts orgasms to make sure she has as many as he does.

Oh, also? The Internet = DEATH. I mean, someone like me can spew my opinion about how much I dislike Franzen's book and shoot it into the ether for all the world to read. Who the hell am I? Obviously, the Internet is the end of civilization as we know it.

I was easily drawn in to this world, and the story was interesting and very detailed. The ending was a bit of a let-down, and it would have been cool to have one example of a feminist that wasn't absolutely miserable. I do like his style, although this wasn't my favorite of his.

I just finished “Purity,” and I’m not sure what to make of it.

In classic Jonathan Franzen fashion, the book is about a lot. The free flow of information. Squats in Oakland. The end of East Germany. The challenges of journalism. The sins of the parents visited on the children. Messianic personalities. Cunnilingus. Writers named Jonathan.

Then why am I left with an image of shit?

It’s funny. I’ve read “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” Franzen’s previous two novels, and though I enjoyed both of them at the time – he’s an amazing writer, capable of both propulsive storytelling and expansive digressions – I can barely remember details from either. I vaguely recall a gentrifying Minnesota neighborhood in “Freedom,” and a tangled trip to the chaotic former Communist bloc in “The Corrections.” But when it comes to lasting images, what comes to mind is a talking turd on a cruise ship, when the patriarch in “The Corrections” has a drug-fueled hallucination.

There’s shit in “Purity,” too. Sometimes it’s literal and sometimes metaphorical, but there it is: a world of shit.

Perhaps that’s Franzen’s ultimate message. That we’re always dealing with a world of shit and trying to do our best to keep our hands (and noses) clean. And, despite our best laid plans, it’s impossible.

The primary characters in “Purity” certainly try to be clean. There’s ramshackle 20-something Purity “Pip” Tyler – and I’m sure there are some “Great Expectations” parallels if I want to unpack them – who squeaks out an existence in Oakland as a low-level marketer with an environmental group. There’s Andreas Wolf, a German Julian Assange-type figure who runs a Wikileaks-type operation from the jungles of Bolivia, and there's Tom Aberant (are there really people whose last name is “Aberant”? Google says there are 56, apparently), an independent investigative journalist and publisher based in Denver.

Though the book starts with Pip, it ends up really being about Andreas and Tom. The pair’s paths crossed when the wall came down in Berlin, and besides a shared passion for exposing truths, the two also cooperated on a crime. In the years since, Andreas has created the Sunlight Project to expose crimes and hypocrisy, and Tom has run an aggressive news operation. But both are haunted by their pasts.

In particular, they’re haunted by their mothers and their spouses.

Which is what finally brought me up short with “Purity.” Has any book ever been filled with such unsympathetic women?

Andreas’ mother, a professor, is manipulative and cruel, prone to catatonic depression. Tom’s mother – originally from Germany – also falls apart easily. Andreas marries a much younger woman who idolizes him, but he soon grows bored of her. Tom marries a slightly older woman who is difficult and clingy (as well as being heir to a fortune, which she refuses). Tom’s wife even gets pregnant with his child out of spite.

You may have guessed who the child grows up to be.

I can’t figure out the point of such cardboard female figures. (Not that Tom and Andreas are heroic – Andreas, indeed, is even more troubled than his mother.) Is Franzen trying to say something about how men have mother issues? Is it an examination of mental illness in women? Is he trying to draw thematic lines between the women and the façade of purity maintained by East Germany and/or American motherhood? Is he secretly sympathetic with his very difficult characters?

He can certainly write. I kept reading Tom’s dialogues with Anabel, his broken artist wife – who will only have sex when the moon is full, who takes years to make a documentary called “A River of Meat,” who parses every sentence for offense – despite wanting to skip past them. (Andreas’ mother was a little easier, given her character is surrounded by stories of the Stasi and the fall of East Germany.)

But I leave “Purity” with a sense that Franzen missed his opportunity. As he’s done with his previous novels, he seemed to want to tie together many strands of modern life and say something big and overarching. He even lays it out a few pages before the end:

“Pip nodded, but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?”

But that, and the many shrewd observations (he could give Tom Wolfe a run for his money) that he makes on the way there, add up to a “so what?” So what if there’s no such thing as “purity”? So what if love is hard to maintain and idealism smacks of illusion? So what if power corrupts?

I have no doubt such things are true, and I don’t mind if Franzen is cynical about them. (Though not THAT cynical – he could have easily ended the book on a tragic and horrifying note, and he pulled back. Mostly.) But they make for an ultimately unsatisfying book.

Again, the man can write. But maybe he should write small next time. I’ve got enough shit to deal with.

Like other Franzen's none of the characters were particularly likeable and there was no happy ending, but the writing is fantastic and the story is excellent.

I very much enjoyed Franzen's earlier novels, particularly Freedom, but this one was a huge waste of time. It started out well but about half-way through I began to lose interest. I stuck it out though, hoping it would get better. The last half was a hard slog with no real pay-off at the end. Very disappointing.

Not a protagonist I was engaged by.