--- title: Review: Jonathan Franzen’s Purity Examines Wealth and Identity description: Purity Tyler, the hero of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, has a very contemporary problem: she owes $130,000 in college loans. Purity, who hates her name... canonical: https://time.com/4003713/jonathan-franzens-new-novel-purity/ author: Radhika Jones article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-20T00:43:39.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T10:17:45.535Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Review: Jonathan Franzen’s Purity Examines Wealth and Identity og:description: Purity Tyler, the hero of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, has a very contemporary problem: she owes $130,000 in college loans. Purity, who hates her name... og:url: https://time.com/4003713/jonathan-franzens-new-novel-purity/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0298313e1f1c5e8d/69886030cd1bba4aec6fcd28/81i0a3u6h0l.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 81i0A3u6H0L og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Review: Jonathan Franzen’s Purity Examines Wealth and Identity twitter:description: Purity Tyler, the hero of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, has a very contemporary problem: she owes $130,000 in college loans. Purity, who hates her name... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0298313e1f1c5e8d/69886030cd1bba4aec6fcd28/81i0a3u6h0l.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Review: Jonathan Franzen's _Purity_ Examines Wealth and Identity > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Radhika Jones](https://time.com/author/radhika-jones/)  ## Radhika Jones Aug 20, 2015 12:43 AM UTC   by [Radhika Jones](https://time.com/author/radhika-jones/)  ## Radhika Jones Aug 20, 2015 12:43 AM UTC Purity Tyler, the hero of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, has a very contemporary problem: she owes $130,000 in college loans. Purity, who hates her name and goes by Pip, grew up with her eccentric mother in a 500-square-foot cabin outside Santa Cruz. She knows nothing of her father—her mother obstinately refuses to reveal his identity—but her debt sends her on a quest to discover his name and, crucially, whether he can chip in on her monthly payments. Along the way, she meets a very contemporary character: Andreas Wolf, professional leaker, lady-killer and fierce rival of Julian Assange. From his camp in Bolivia, Wolf, an East German dissident turned political fugitive, runs an operation called the Sunlight Project, whose mission is to air the world’s dirty laundry. Pip cares little for such grandeur, but she thinks the project’s powerful servers might help her locate her missing father. When an internship with Wolf drops into her lap, she heads for South America, starting a series of revelations that result in a confession of murder, a suicide and the unlikely reunion of her parents. _Purity_ comes five years after _Freedom_ and 14 years after _The Corrections_. Both earlier novels were called masterpieces of American fiction; to say the same of _Purity_ might be true but misses the point. Magisterial sweep is now just what Franzen does, and his new novel appears not as explosion of literary talent (_The Corrections_) nor as glorious confirmation of it (_Freedom_) but as a simple, enjoyable reminder of his sharp-eyed presence. Near the end of _Purity_, Wolf muses on his use of the word totalitarian to describe life in the digital age: --- > “” --- One might say the same of Franzen’s role in the culture. Perhaps it’s a bit rich for a writer to offer home truths about the Internet when (as he revealed in a 2010 TIME cover profile) he keeps it at bay by gluing shut his Ethernet port. But _Purity_ assures us that, oppose Franzen’s truths or not, we readers can’t escape them. And they’re only coming faster. Franzen’s world, like any teeming ecosystem, has its irritants. In _Purity_, people engage in toxic relationships, parents are either overbearing or absentee, and self-righteousness rises to the level of performance art (the performance being either masturbation or media appearance). Pip suffers from a common plague of coming-of-age heroes: she lacks a sense of self. Early on, she doesn’t act so much as flail. For a scene or two, she doesn’t seem worth our time. But she has a sharp tongue, and gradually, over the 550-odd pages that bear her name, she begins to assert herself. She says no. She says it to powerful people and to the people who mean the most to her. Amid the frenetic ­subplots—backstories of Stasi-­surveilled East Germany and the agribusiness conglomerates of the American Midwest—it’s bit of a throwback miracle to discern as through line the voice of a young woman discovering her authority. And _Purity_, in its loose and self-­assured way, gestures openly toward narratives past. Franzen excels at being timely—the post-financial-crisis vernacular, the Snowden name checks, the journalists funded by angel ­investors—but nobody christens a character Pip without courting comparison to Dickens’ orphan. The idea behind _Great Expectations_ is that wealth, however well intentioned, is not separable from its origins: Dickens’ Pip cannot accept money from a convict, and the novelist as moralist makes sure of that. Much of _Purity_, likewise, is devoted to the scrutiny of money and motive, the aspiration (as the title suggests) to clear from a good life’s pursuits the shame of any ill-gotten gains. But Franzen chases a different resolution. Bankruptcy, poverty, crippling debt: if these social scourges trace back at least in part to the deep financial dealings of institutions beyond our control, then perhaps even the most morally suspect fortune can be used to negate them. Or as Pip pragmatically puts it, “There’s got to be at least $3 million you can take in good conscience.” Our very contemporary problems, then, bring us past idealism to compromise. And Franzen, even in a novel that flirts hard with Dickensesque coincidence, cements his place in the ranks of the realists. Maybe it’s because the fortune in _Purity_ is so absurdly big, and the needs it can alleviate so relatively small, but the idea of a troubled inheritance suddenly seems like a playful thing, a route to contentment instead of a roadblock. This is still Franzenland: _Purity_ closes on a profane shouting match between two adults who really ought to know better. 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