Staff Pick: Purity by Jonathan Franzen

The characters in Jonathan Franzen's latest novel Purity are all connected by one person, Purity Tyler, who goes by the nickname "Pip". Like her namesake in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations, Pip Tyler is a young person whose life is shaped by past events she does not understand.

We meet Pip when she is 23, saddled with a huge student debt and an emotionally needy mother. She's smart, funny in an offhand way, unhappy in her job, and fairly unsuccessful in romantic relationships. A seemingly chance encounter with Annagret, a beautiful German visitor, leads to an invitation to join the Wikileaks-like "Sunshine Project" as an intern. Pip is skeptical of the group's founder, Andreas Wolfe, but is eventually drawn in by a promise that the Sunshine Project can help her find out who her father is (her mother will not divulge this information but Pip hopes she can find him and get him to pay off some of her student debt). The story moves around in time and place, between 1960s-1990s East Berlin, 1990s New York, and present day at the Sunshine Project's Bolivian compound.

Purity is divided into seven sections, each relating parts of the story from a different character's perspective: Pip begins, centres, and ends the book, two sections are devoted to the magnetic and strange Andreas Wolfe, and one sections each from the point of view of journalists Tom Aberant, and Leila Helou. Through the narrative another important character emerges: Annabel Laird, an artist who has rejected her large inheritance and creates chaos for those who love her. This is where Jonathan Franzen really excels: creating diverse voices and vivid characters. What first attracted me to Franzen as a writer was his ability to write women characters who were complex and struggled with the social expectations put upon them to be "nice". Reading Purity, as well as his previous novel Freedom, I found many moments of recognition and sometimes unflattering truth. In this novel even though Pip as a character may represent the ideal of Purity pursued by several other characters, she is still very human and imperfect.

The story of Purity is complex and sometimes suspenseful -part of the suspense is created by the reader trying to guess exactly how the characters fit together. There's also a murder, the dread of living in Communist Germany, and the excitement and disillusionment of the Sunshine Project's truth-telling mission. Purity is also about ideas: feminism, the far reaching effects of the internet on our culture, fame, privilege, class, education, love; there is a lot to think about and talk about in this book, but none of it comes at the expense of character and story. I think it would be a great choice for literary minded book clubs.

If you read and liked Purity and haven't read Franzen's other acclaimed novels yet his most notable works are
The Corrections and Freedom.

Purity has also made me want to re-visit Great Expectations "In these literary novels, characters idealistically seeking fame and fortune find instead a rocky, dangerous coming-of-age journey through unforeseen situations while confronting unpredictable people. Both are darkly witty and psychologically rich stories filled with unforgettable, complex characters". -- Jen Baker, Novelist

Woman and Children First - suspenseful tales of shipwrecks

Women and Children First
by Gill Paul

"The Titanic was the most magnificent ship ever built, offering every possible luxury to her passengers -- yet on the night on the 14th of April, 1912, she sank in the North Atlantic, leaving the lucky ones floating in wooden rowing boats, and the rest struggling for their lives in the icy water. This novel follows the fortunes of Reg, a handsome young steward who works in the first-class dining room; Annie, a gifted Irishwoman who is travelling to America with her four children; Juliette, a titled English lady who is pregnant and unmarried; an American millionaire and his wife who are trapped in a poisoned marriage; and a mystery passenger who never shows her face in public. The sinking of the Titanic not only steals lives but blows apart the futures of those who survive. Coming to terms with the shocking events, survivors form new attachments, make decisions with tragic consequences, and watch all their old certainties crumble. How can life ever be the same again when you have heard 1,500 people dying in the water around you?" - publisher

The Lifeboat: a novel 
by Charlotte Rogan

"A young woman's first-person story of survival against seemingly insurmountable odds reveals truths about human nature and, particularly, about herself. Married just four weeks earlier, Grace and Henry Winter cut short their visit to London in 1914 after Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated. Wealthy Henry is able to book their passage back to New York on the Empress Alexandra and then to wangle space on a lifeboat for Grace as the ship is sinking. Grace's survival is never in question in the opening pages, she's one of three women from her lifeboat being tried for murder but her story is no less harrowing for that, since she reveals more of herself throughout her ordeal. Early on, ship's crewman Mr. Hardie is a hero on the boat, providing invaluable if harsh leadership, whether deeming that some must be sacrificed for the sake of all or strictly doling out limited rations. But things change as conditions worsen. This is an accomplished first novel, noteworthy for its moral complexity and the sheer power of its story.-" - Booklist

The Chain Locker
by Robert Chaulk

"Bob Chaulk's dramatic story begins in 1931 when thirteen-year-old Jackie Gould is a stowaway on the steamer "Viking" bound for the sealing grounds of the North Atlantic. When the ship's supply of blasting powder accidentally explodes, Jackie finds himself drifting on a piece of ice in the dark with an older sailer. The Chain Locker shows us how heroism, loyalty, and friendship play out in this amazing novel based on true stories about brave Newfoundland sealers." - publisher

 

It Happened in Israel - new Hebrew fiction

The Missing File by D. A. Mishani (M)
translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen

Police detective Avraham Avraham knows that when a crime is committed in his sleepy suburb of Tel Aviv, there is little need for a complex investigation. There are no serial killers or kidnappings here. The perpetrator is usually the neighbor, the uncle, or the father. As he has learned, the simplest explanation is always the answer. But his theory is challenged when a sixteen-year-old boy named Ofer Sharabi disappears without a trace while on his way to school one morning. There is no simple explanation, and Avraham's ordered world is consumed by the unimaginable perplexity of the case.

"An outstanding first novel. . . . Mishani puts his expertise in the genre to good use in combining the procedural and the puzzle with artful misdirection." - Publisher Weekly
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The Retrospective by A.B. Yehoshua (M)
translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman

Unsettled during a retrospective of his early work, aging film director Yair Moses attempts to reconcile with the difficult but brilliant screenwriter from whom he is estranged, but the price that Trigano demands will have lasting consequences.

"With beautiful wordsmanship, Yehoshua entangles dignity and humiliation, repugnance and rapture, showing us how difficult they become to distinguish" - Library Journal
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Between Friends by Amos Oz (M)
translated by Sondra Silverston

Set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yikhat, eight interconnected stories portray men and women who endure personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century.

"The mind is a place Oz explores masterfully in all its contradiction, texture and heartache. Between Friends paints the daily lives behind utopian dreams, fully realized." - New York Daily News
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Lineup by Liad Shoham (M)
translated from the Hebrew by Sara Kitai

Lineup is a twisted tale of mistaken identity, organized crime, a disgraced detective looking for redemption, a tireless young reporter, and an innocent man with a not-so-innocent past. Which lines will they cross and what will they be willing to risk, as their worlds begin to collapse?

"Making his U.S. debut, best-selling Israeli author Shoham (the "Israeli John Grisham") has written an enjoyable and compelling thriller that should appeal to fans of urban crime thrillers (such as those by Michael Connelly and Robert Crais)" - Library Journal
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The Property by Rutu Modan (M) 
translation by Jessica Cohen

Rutu Modan's second full-length graphic novel is a triumph of storytelling and fine lines. After the death of her son, Regina Segal takes her granddaughter Mica to Warsaw, hoping to reclaim a family property lost during the Second World War. As they get to know modern Warsaw, Regina is forced to recall difficult things about her past, and Mica begins to wonder if maybe their reasons for coming aren't a little different than what her grandmother led her to believe. Modan offers up a world populated by prickly seniors, smart-alecky public servants, and stubborn women--a world whose realism is expressed alternately in the absurdity of people's behavior and in the complex consequences of their sacrifices. Rutu Modan was born in Israel in 1966. She lives in Tel Aviv.

"The pursuit of old family documents is concurrent with the unearthing of family secrets, but Modan doesn't dole out the revelations with alarm or melodrama, but rather with a casual good nature toward her subjects, backed up with art somewhat reminiscent of Tintin but revealing the deepest memories of guilt and loss with merely the twitch of a line. A beautiful, fully realized story that's as much "novel" as "graphic" - Publisher Weekly

New Fiction - 3 creative novels

The Blazing World (M)
by Siri Hustvedt

"With The Blazing World, internationally best­selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt, who has long been celebrated for her “beguiling, lyrical prose” (The Sunday Times Books, London), tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity." - publisher

"A heady, suspenseful, funny, and wrenching novel of creativity, identity, and longing." - Booklist

Fire in the Unnameable Country (M)
by Ghalib Islam

"The universe is shaking as Hedayat, the "glossolalist" narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country's history and expose the roots of its crisis." - puiblisher

“The 1001 Nights of its time – rooms opening into rooms, stories into stories, in the same literary mansion as Calvino, Burroughs, and other metafabulist satirists: horrifying, funny, written in a language all its own.” - Margaret Atwood 

Dept. of Speculation (M)
by Jenny Offill

"Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art." - publisher


"Nothing depicted in this portrait of a family in quiet disarray is unfamiliar in life or in literature, and that is the artistic magic of Offill's stunning performance. She has sliced life thin enough for a microscope slide and magnified it until it fills the mind's eye and the heart." - Booklist

Experimental Psychological Fiction - 3 novels that will mess with your mind

The Way Through Doors (M)
by Jesse Ball

"Municipal Inspector Selah Morse rushes to the aid of a young woman struck by a taxi. He takes her to a hospital, where he is told her only injury is that she has lost her memory. A doctor tells Selah that he must not let her sleep, and he must help her regain her memory, but neither Selah nor the woman even knows her name. So Selah tells her stories through the long night, in the hope that the stories will trigger her memories. His stories often sound like folktales or fairy tales, and some contain maxims or morals. Some intersect with the Lewis Carroll-like sense that the author creates of a New York City where some people may be ideas instead of corporeal beings. Some of the stories are retold from the perspective of another character. But all deal with facets of being human: love, jealousy, or notions of honor. The Way through Doors is heady stuff. It's charming, lyrical, fanciful, and funny, and it invites a suspension of disbelief that may be a tonic for our parlous times" - Booklist

The Time of Our Singing (M)
by Richard Powers

"A magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted -- and divided -- family, set against the backdrop of postwar America. On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson's epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish emigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Philadelphia Negro studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and--against all odds and better judgment--they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. But their three children must survive America's brutal here and now." - publisher

"Powers' (Ploughing the Dark, Galatea 2.2) celebrated intellect is fully evident in this sweeping story as he forges unlikely connections between race and physics, and music and time. But behind Powers' intimidating brain is a heart too often overlooked, and even as the narrative artfully switches tenses and folds back upon itself (reflecting the knotted shape of time), this remarkable novel sings from its tortured soul as much as from its polyphonic mind." - Booklist

Identity (M)
by Milan Kundera ; translated from the French by Linda Asher

"There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples--indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation--and the vague sense of panic it inspires--the very fabric of his new novel. Here brevity goes hand in hand with intensity, and a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a labyrinthine journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside and what the mind creates in its solitude." - publisher