Purity by Jonathan Franzen

Purity Tyler, nicknamed Pip is a recent college graduate working in a dead end sales job with no hope of ever paying off her student loans.  She was raised in poverty in a rural Northern California town by a reclusive and eccentric mother who remains Pip’s best friend.  Pip’s mother has gone to great lengths to conceal her true identity and refuses to reveal anything about Pip’s father.  Pip lives in Oakland in a commune with a group of anarchists because that’s all she can afford and meets an East German woman who convinces her to intern with The Sunlight Project in Bolivia.  The Sunlight Project is run by an East German, Andreas Wolf who hires young idealist computer geeks to search out secrets to reveal to the world and therefore, make it a better place.

 

But Wolf has some secrets of his own.  Raised in East Germany under Communist rule by parents with prestigious government jobs and no time for a child, Wolf ultimately becomes a sexual predator and then a murderer.  But he has gained celebrity and credibility as an exposer of great injustice and lives in exile in Bolivia managing The Sunlight Project.  Only one person can expose him for the poser and deviate he truly is.  Tom Aberant met Wolf in Germany at a time when Tom was trying to end his marriage to Anabel, the daughter of a wealthy American agricultural tycoon.  Anabel had renounced her family because she thought their gains ill-gotten and their values immoral.  She fervently controls Tom and squelches any professional aspirations he develops.  Tom had made this trip to Germany primarily to escape Anabel and quite by accident meets Andreas Wolf in a bar.  In a drunken state of guilt, Wolf confesses his sins to Tom and Tom takes pity and helps Wolf cover up his involvement in the murder.

 

Now twenty some years later, Tom owns an online newspaper in Denver that was started with seed money from his father-in-law.  Anabel disappeared years earlier without revealing her pregnancy to Tom.  Wolf is increasingly worried Tom could out him at any time and uses his resources to get some dirt on Tom.  He discovers Anabel’s ‘hideout’ and her daughter Pip.  He sends the East German woman, a former lover to Oakland to recruit Pip for Sunlight. Wolf thinks by brain washing Pip and sending her to Tom, he can monitor the journalist’s activities and somehow deter any attempts to expose Wolf’s secrets.  But remember, Pip doesn’t know Tom is her father and Tom doesn’t know he even has a daughter.  Exposing this truth may be Wolf’s most consequential to date.

I chose to read Purity because it appeared on several best of 2015 lists and I felt the need to venture outside my preferred genre.  The book is way too long, bloated with information about characters you don’t need to know.  Plus there is much not to like about these characters.  I almost gave up on this book several times.  Yet there is an important lesson here.  The choices we make for our lives will impact others down the line more than we can fathom.  And I did enjoy the way the author connected the dots of so many supposed unrelated characters… made for some fun ‘ah-ha’ moments.