When he’s not pissing off Oprah, Jonathan Franzen writes sometimes, too, having delivered two of the most talked-about books of the 21st century with The Corrections and Freedom. In a few months, he’ll release his fifth novel—Purity.
The vaguely mysterious, 400-page text follows the intertwined eras and lives of a few different characters, including the titular Purity Tyler, who embarks on a soul-searching internship with The Sunlight Project—an organization run by Andreas Wolf, a controversial German figure set on exposing government corruption. But probably not just that because, you know, 400 pages.
Before the book comes out this September, the New Yorker has made a massive excerpt available online. “The Republic of Bad Taste” begins in the middle of the action, sometime around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and introduces Wolf before he leaves (or is kicked out of) Germany. As you’ll see, it veers slightly fantastical in a way unlike Franzen’s earlier work—less Virginia Woolf and more Michael Crichton. Seriously.
And if you’re already put off by the book’s title (and you definitely should be), you can take sweet, sweet solace in knowing that Franzen himself was hesitant about going with it. Speaking at BookExpo in New York, the author noted, “I don’t know why I chose to put that title on the book and I kept wishing I could come up with a better one, because there’s something vaguely icky about ‘purity’. Just the letters P-U-R, there’s something about them… It’s like, I consider it an act of courage to say the name of my novel is Purity.”
Courage is one way of putting it. You can read the New Yorker‘s excerpt here.
Purity is out September 1 via Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
