A rollicking satire on the way we live now

Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series of lampoons of writers expected to produce ‘big books’, writers named Jonathan and an assortment of other self-referential gags, but also the fact that its eponymous heroine, Purity Tyler, is nicknamed Pip. This Pip’s expectations are played off against those of Franzen’s readers: she won’t get what she expects, of course, any more than Dickens’s original Pip did. But to a great extent, our expectations will be met: this is a ‘big book’, a rollicking, sharply observed contemporary satire of family life and cultural politics.

There are other burdens for our heroine beyond her highly charged names: she also has $130,000 of college debt and an emotionally demanding, apparently unstable mother, who lives in seclusion and refuses to tell Pip anything about her family, including who her father is. Pip lives with Marxist protestors, squatters and a kind-hearted paranoid schizophrenic in a house that once would have been described as countercultural, but now is probably just alt-cultural.