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It would be better if we all read Franzen in a vacuum. Because as soon as his name comes into the picture, everything gets skewed. For better or for worse (though mostly the latter) his personality and image overtake his actual works and color what we say about them. While reading Purity I struggled to think of this as a book rather than a Franzen book. I tried to anticipate how people would react to it and whether their reactions would be valid or too thrown by the author.With all those caveats...
Sadly this novel and its full-chestedly tepid prose fucking sucks.
Apparently, I looked really intense while reading this, which seems appropriate for one of Franzen’s Big Serious Books, but this one felt lighter than The Corrections and Freedom, and funnier somehow, even though it has all the things I expect from Franzen: the calling out of our emptiness, technology and what it’s done to us, the intense love-hate-needy relationship thing, the girlfriends and wives and mothers are all evil thing, the all fathers are selfish assholes thing, and so on. What I’ve
Just a bunch of mentally unstable characters who destroy everyone around them. Their problems and moral dilemmas may seem unreasonable, but the story is very well written so it's quite interesting to read this psychological mess.
i don't even know what to say in this review - it's a big book by a big author so there's not going to be any shortage of reviews for it, both on here and in the greater world. but me, i just didn't like it. and that surprised me. the only other book i have read by franzen was The Corrections, and i liked it a lot. this one sounded like such a crazy departure from franzen's general small-scope but deep-focus take on themes of marriage and family and other interpersonal relationships (i mean, rev...
Up till now, I’ve defended Jonathan Franzen. That’s despite his skirmishes with Oprah and Jennifer Weiner, his curmudgeonly comments about social media and his bizarre statement about adopting an Iraqi war orphan to understand millennials.The author of The Corrections and Freedom can write. Who cares what people who don’t read his books – and only troll Twitter – think?But now I’m reconsidering.His new novel is ponderous, bloated and tin-eared. Something’s wrong when a book only gets going...
Yikes... Almighty! Ambitious....and utterly engrossing!!! I say 'mostly' ....not with a negative slant ....but because there were several times where I paused -- ( I just needed to sit and think about what was written). When I had natural reading breaks....(driving in a car, acupuncture session, swimming, etc. ).... my thoughts were still with this book. Jonathan Franzen is an immensely gifted writer. Plus, contemporary fiction --is agenre I enjoy. However, this book may not be for everyone: It'...
Franzen’s novels now have a recognisable formula. The passing of the narrative baton between several characters who collectively will tell a family history. Some have said this novel is a departure from his familiar familial territory – but I didn’t see that at all. This is another novel about a family, or, more accurately, two families. I continually felt like I was reading an inferior version of Freedom and The Corrections (both novels I loved). Some have seen it as an attack on the internet.
"So many Jonathans. A Plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.” - Jonathan Franzen, Purity I went into this novel with the same trepidation I approach with all of Jonathan Franzen's novels. I admire his talent. Generally, enjoy his fiction, style, and prose, but also end up worn out and wrung out after reading them. Both The Corrections and Freedom...
Big Johnny Franzen is not on top of his game here. Instead, his game is on top of him. This novel was built too high and extended in all directions, probably without planning permission, so maybe no surprise that the ceilings all sag and a lot of the windows are busted out. Leaks everywhere. I lost track of who was actually living in it, people traipsing in all hours of the day and night. Who’s that? Is it Tom’s girlfriend’s first husband’s second wife? Or Pip’s lover’s son’s friend’s father who...
Franzen in Purgatory?”After all, as Aquinas wrote, the least degree of pain in Purgatory ‘surpasses the greatest pain that one can endure in this world.’” ----Stephen Greenblatt in Hamlet in PurgatoryWriting a novel is an intimate act. And a novel about intimate acts is even more revealing. After listening, twice, to Purity read on audio by Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff, I immediately listened to several of the author interviews Franzen gave in the push phase of his novel promoti...
“It sucks to be well-known,” says a character in the new novel by well-known author Jonathan Franzen. “Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person.”It’s tempting to hear that — and mock that — as the author’s cri de coeur. Who else has ever worn the mantle of “The Great American Novelist” so uncomfortably, so unable to relish his fame or renounce it? Even as we’ve largely expelled literary writers f...
100 pages to go (and I will finish) and reading a review in the LA Book Review despite trying to avoid all press, sums up my experience.What darkens Purity and weakens its realist musculature is Franzen’s atavistic treatment of male and female character. In Purity’s calculus, men are predators, women prey, and rape an inevitable aspect of being. We are asked to regard the male characters’ sexual urges — including rape, incest, pedophilia, the consumption of brutal pornography, and acts of murder...
After the critical success of Franzen's last two novels – both of which I really enjoyed – the release of his first book in five years was always going to be a big deal. I hadn’t read any in-depth reviews prior to launching into it myself (I try to avoid this at all costs) but I had picked up the feeling that though some people really enjoyed it most reviewers pretty much loathed it. Interesting...The criticism this book received put me in mind of the reaction to Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simm...
There are families, there are fucked-up families and there are fucked-up Franzen families - and boy, does he excel himself here.I may have read this in a flu-induced delirium but I thought his equating the internet machine with the totalitarian state of the GDR was just inspired.