![]() ![]() ![]() This dialogue seems to be most frequently discussed in the context of judging Pip’s line about “moral hazard” cute-funny or annoying-unfunny, but that small joke is actually just the first time the novel takes up the issue of loving someone who harms you because you have no other option psychologically. The novel opens with a conversation between the title character and her mother. Motherhood in particular plays a prominent role in the novel. Some of these are romantic others are parental. Most of the relationships in Purity are permanent. Its frequently described as simply “domestic fiction,” but I see Franzen’s work more along the lines of Sam Tanenhaus’s “naturalistic story of domestic strife and estrangement (and sexual combat) within the larger workings of a ‘paranoid’ conspiracy.” Caleb Crain in The Atlantic emphasizes the relationships more, and how they are all engineered to drive one character or another toward what is called in The Twenty-Seventh City “the State,” that is, one of paranoia. It was a terrible nonreview-inane clickbait that made no reference to a single line from a single Franzen novel-that finally pushed me to do so. After disappointment in Freedom, however, I hadn’t been in much of a rush to read Purity. ![]() I initially became a fan of Jonathan Franzen before The Corrections was out in paperback. ![]()
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