Simply put, it’s a very Dickensian kind of tale ( Great Expectations is a big inspiration) about a good pure girl in search of her father.

Well, the plot is fairly straight-forward. What about the plot? What about the themes of the book? That’s probably because he is the most normal person around, and his very saneness keeps the weirdos in the book somewhat likable.Īnyway, enough about the characters. In general, all those sections in which Tom is present are the best portions of the book.

The love/hate story of the two secondary characters – Tom and Anabel is what anchors this book, and gives it heart. Once Pip and Andreas get out of the way of the story, it starts to get really exciting. And it is this background that forms the really interesting part of the book. When Andreas and Purity meet, sparks fly. Yup, that’s the character of Andreas in a nutshell. But there were the bus driver’s feelings to consider. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. He often fantasizes about killing off the women around him, and he’s got major mommy issues. She is obsessed about paying off her $130,000 student loan, and she wants to find her daddy, so that he can pay off the loan for her.Īndreas Wolf is quite simply a psychopath. Pip – the titular character who is supposedly the pure heroine of the novel spends a lot of time trying to seduce older men. These people have ISSUES, and they are constantly thinking about these issues, and verbalizing them until even the dumbest reader gets just how massive these ISSUES are. Not only are they extreme, they are also extremely self-obsessed and introspective. One reason for loving it is the pure out-thereness of some of these characters – Purity, Andreas, Anabel, Annagret are all so extreme. However, in spite of all the problematic nature of the writing, I simply loved the book. It is definitely very much a white male novel, and I did find his women characters really weird. This is a book that reinforced all the messages I’d been hearing about Franzen and then some. Purity hopes that Wolf would be able to help her find out who is her father. Her hunt for her father’s identity leads her to Andreas Wolf – a charismatic Julian Assange-type of character who lives to publish leaks through his organization The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world. She doesn’t have a clue who her father is, or why her mother has always concealed her own real name. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her mother though very loving is also very weird.

Purity franzen