Purity and the Puritanical
This isn’t going to be an in-depth review of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity; honestly, I think it would need to be a more important book than it is to warrant that kind of engagement. It’s also not meant to be a takedown of the sort that I launched at Friends a little while ago. The fact of the matter is that I find Franzen to be a perfectly serviceable, easily readable, sometimes amusing writer. He’s also somehow managed to trick people into thinking that his work matters more than that of other middlebrow purveyors of Literary Fiction. This is the mystery to me. It’s not that Franzen is bad at what he does. It’s that he garners so much attention for it.
The cover of Jonathan Franzen's aggressively okay novel, Purity.
Purity purports to be about “the battle between the sexes” (a phrase Franzen himself used in an interview), which seems to be a weirdly antiquated prism through which to view the world, but okay. It centers around a series of relationships featuring major power imbalances — sometimes one partner is famous, other times rich, other times simply much older than the other. All of the relationships are uncomplicatedly heterosexual, which isn’t really a huge sin, as most relationships are fairly uncomplicatedly heterosexual, passé though it may be to admit it. Nearly all of them are full of histrionics — but, as Franzen rightly pointed out on Fresh Air a few weeks ago, he’s not the kind of writer whose books are meant to be a simulacrum of reality, but a comically heightened representation of some stuff that happens in reality. It’s an open question as to whether Franzen’s diagnosis of the disease of reality is accurate — parts of it are, parts of it aren’t — but that’s clearly what he’s doing.
He’s come under a hail of criticism from mostly younger reviewers who think his insistence on writing almost entirely about white people, and depicting sexual encounters that live in a hazy zone between consenting and not, amounts to some kind of reactionary political stance. That all strikes me as fairly preposterous — the idea that Franzen “depicts a world in which rape is the natural consequence” of heterosexual relationships, as one Goodreads reviewer contends, seems so out of touch with the book itself that it’s hard to take very seriously — but it is true that Franzen resides fairly squarely in a world in which white people weren’t often asked to confront questions of racial representation and white supremacy. Old dogs, new tricks, I guess. A lot of people who attack the book from a political perspective (a reviewing tactic I find mostly useless, by the way) seem to miss its central thesis, which is that people of Franzen’s generation (X, if you’re wondering) have really put the torch to the world they’re leaving behind for subsequent ones.
But what really mystifies me about Purity’s notability — just as it did about Franzen’s previous overlong tome, Freedom — is that a lot of people seem to behave as though Franzen is the only person on the literary scene doing this kind of work anymore. (Even if that were true, is that a reason to pour so much attention on him? It could be that the Dickensian social novel just doesn’t speak to the modern moment.) In truth, I would guess that a supermajority of books in the English language resemble Franzen’s, at least aesthetically, in many respects. Realism is still the dominant mode in English language literature, and has been for a long time. The fetishization of Franzen sometimes feels like a reactionary yearning for a time when middle-aged white guys doing comic naturalism — your Roths, your Bellows, your Mailers — dominated the bestseller lists and sold enough books that people actually put them on television. That era is over, for better or worse. There are ways in which it is better — more women and people of color joining the discourse everyday; the legitimization of sci-fi and other “genre” works — and ways in which it is worse — nobody fucking reads anymore. The continued need for the establishment to find a Great White Hope feels like the death rattle of an era, at least to this under-40 fictioneer.
Look, like I said, it’s not like Franzen’s bad at what he does. His books are compulsively readable, which is a relief in an era when much of what is accounted Literary Fiction is wilfully difficult for reasons that have never really been ennumerated to me. (I have no problem with difficult books. I have a problem with books that hide their mediocrity by being hard to read, or that seem to be about how hard they are to read. Ahem, Ben Marcus.) He excells at attention to the details of plots, so that his books fit together tightly and there’s often a satisfying a-ha! as you push deeper into the book and figure out how the threads connect. The comic backstory is a gift of his. He appears to be decent at research. And his books are, oftentimes, legitimately funny.
But he leaves a lot to be desired as a stylist, in which field he is exceeded, not only by giants like Didion and Baxter and Lethem, but even by gifted nobodies like (arrogance alert) your humble correspondent. The first-person passages of his books tend to be told in the same workmanlike, nice-enough language as the third-person passages (one of the major flaws of Purity is that there’s a 150-page section told in the first person in which the style is indistinguishable from the book's 400 other pages). From book to book, the tone is the same. It’s one thing to find your voice, and another never to modulate it.
And it’s true, he’s not a deep thinker on matters of race, sexuality, or gender, which — well, given that he appears to have been anointed the Very Serious Important Novelist of Our Times, it puts him far out of touch with the most salient ideas of the 21st century, or at least this part of it. That “battle of the sexes” quotation: really? Haven’t we* outgrown, as a society, the idea that what is going on between men and women constitutes a battle? In many respects I find the Millenial emphasis on euphony and consensus to be tiresome and in some respects destructive, but surely it isn’t accurate to paint the state of gender as a battle, any more than it is to frame race on this planet as a matter of “white v black” or “white v color”, not least because all these categories are fuzzy — but also because the metaphor of battle implies that there are going to be winners and losers, as though this is a debate as opposed to, like, a discussion, man.
*caveats, caveats, caveats about what “we” means: I think you can write them yourselves; it’s almost 7 o’clock and I haven’t eaten yet: let us say that broadly “we” is “Anglophonie”, and you guys can fill in the details about the various factions, unions, and disjunctions in what that is
Of course, there’s this other level on which there’s an irony at play. In the film Trainspotting, our narrator, Mark Renton, says (paraphrasing the book upon which the movie is based), “1000 years from now there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.” This is meant to be the perspective espoused by the young and liberal and hey-man-it’s-all-cool folks, among whom I sort of number, who criticize Franzen’s take on feminism and his failure to represent any people of color who aren’t (A) literally retarded or (B) literally servants. And yet there is not a lot of acceptance or bonhomie in this crowd; instead we are fractious and judgemental, and we spend a lot of our time trying our best to beat one another with various ideological cudgels — cudgels built largley out of identity, but also out of orthodoxy. That’s the irony I’m talking about: Franzen, for all his flaws, seems to have perceived something that strangely sort of anticipates the criticism he’s getting.* He titles the book Purity, and its most prominent character is a young Millenial whose very name is Purity. And it seems to me that purity is something that a lot of young people with allegedly progressive ideas are demanding these days: perfection of agreement, adherence to orthodoxy; every failure to agree is accounted a failure, period. That, of course, is not only a huge bummer but an extremely destructive way of evaluating art, politics, or anything else in society.
* by the way, I find his depiction of “feminism” per se unfair, but I suspect it’s also meant to be unfair — not least because it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the reality that there is no “feminism” but instead “feminisms”
Anyhoozy, this all puts me in mind of a question I’ve been pondering a lot of late: if we see the broad societal collapse that a lot of people seem to be expecting in the (relatively) near future, what happens to all this movement toward acceptance of difference? I suspect, just based on history, that almost all of it vanishes in a puff of smoke. I’m not asserting that bare survival necessarily trumps the ongoing project of social justice; I’m suggesting that the ongoing project of social justice is a project dependent on a functioning society, and in a society of pandemic disorder, old evils will begin to assert themselves: patriarchy, vicious ethnic conflict, etc. Not that those things aren’t extant now, but they may become the ruling ideologies in an anarchic world. (Look for my book, 101 Reasons Anarchists Are Idiots, due out any minute now.) In a violent world, violence organizes itself against the other.
Holy shit, that got dark quickly.
