andreas wolf you will always be famous

Kind of a long haul. Like watching daytime TV marathon...These people are so screwed up with toxic relationships you feel good about yourself by comparison. Franzen's books may be long because he's not sure how to end them. This one seems to have lost its way in the end.

Not my cup of tea. This was my first Franzen novel, so maybe I'll try another of his books sometime, but it won't be for awhile.

This book took me a LONG time to finish and in part it was the length but also I didn't have an urge to keep reading when I picked it up. I've enjoyed other books by,Franzen more than this one.

I echo a lot of other reviewers' comments. I enjoyed Franzen's previous books -- especially Strong Motion and Corrections, but also Freedom. After those, Purity was a huge disappointment. I could not get past 50% on the Kindle, the story was so completely boring AND chauvinistic. The only part I enjoyed of the first half was the introductory descriptions of the Santa Cruz landscape, because I have lived there. After California, the book went straight downhill in the most tedious manner. I'm not even going to wait around til the real antifeminism I've heard about sets in, I hate the book enough already, and am not wasting any more time on it. Franzen is much too arrogant in his interviews to be allowed to publish this trash.

Well written but I didn't like/couldn't relate to the characters-although it could be because they were all purposely flawed.

Lacking both heart and energy, it's unclear Franzen wanted to write this book. Instead of a narrative ambitious either internally or externally, this instead seems a collection of half-baked mini-obsessions, none of which sustain the author. The characters are half-formed, especially the women, who, from Franzen's telling, operate entirely on wishing to either have sex with older men or their regret for being too old to have babies. For literary pop fiction, this book lacks both pop intrigue and literary accomplishment.

It was fine. Seriously not anything special, and unlike Corrections or Freedom, nothing I think I would care to read again. The characters didn’t do anything and nothing happened, but they sounded Franzeny so if you’re into that, have fun.

4 - -
Il fatto che Franzen abbia scritto libri immensi e che noi lettori ci scontriamo con questo paragone - *pretendendo* sempre quei livelli - non è un problema di Franzen, è un problema nostro.
Purity ha sicuramente dei limiti, ma per me è una gran bella storia.
Avercene, di libri come Purity, scritti da chiunque.