Purity (novel)
Cover, 1st edition
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| Author | Jonathan Franzen |
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| Cover artist | Rodrigo Corral (design) Bon Duke (photograph) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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Publication date
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September 1, 2015 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 563 |
| ISBN | |
Purity is a novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published on September 1, 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The novel tells the intersecting stories of several different people of widely diverging ages and backgrounds.
Purity Tyler, who goes by the name "Pip" and is in her early 20s with $130,000 in student loan debt, was raised by her reclusive mother Penelope in Felton, California, south of the Bay area. Her mother tells her nothing about her own background, not even her original name or age. The one time she reveals that she and Pip are in hiding from her abusive ex turns out to have been cribbed from someone's memoir. Over her mother's objections, Pip is recruited by Annagret, a German anti-nuclear activist, to work for Andreas Wolf, the charismatic leader of The Sunshine Project, a fictional competitor to , headquartered in Bolivia. Among other things, Wolf promises to help search for Pip's father.
Andreas Wolf, born in the 1950s in East Germany, the son (or so he thinks) of an important SED Central Committee member and his flighty wife Katya, gets himself kicked out of university for publishing embarrassing poetry and lives for years in a church basement, helping troubled youths. After seven years, when he was 27-year-old, a 15-year-old girl, Annagret, comes to him with the problem of her stepfather, a Stasi informant who is molesting her. He falls in love with her. Together, they kill the stepfather, burying his body in the backyard of Andreas' parents' dacha. They separate for a time, to not draw attention to themselves. When nothing happens, Wolf becomes convinced that the Stasi is keeping the regular police away to spare his father trouble.
Two years later, the Berlin Wall comes down and Wolf is afraid his crime will be exposed, partly because his parents are thinking of selling their dacha to Westerners who want to raze and redevelop the estate, doubtlessly uncovering the body. His father arranges for one last favor with the party, and Wolf gets access to his Stasi records and those of Annagret's stepfather, early on the first day outsiders are allowed into the archives. While trying to leave on the sly with carbon copies he is not supposed to have, he runs into television cameras and on the spot becomes a celebrity dissident, shining "sunlight" on the state's secrets. He then meets an American journalist, Tom Aberant.
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