Jonathan Franzen. (2015). Purity: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jonathan Franzen. 2015. Purity: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Jonathan Franzen. Purity: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/9B2/E1A/1C/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/9B2/E1A/1C/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374710743
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00UWF75RE
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374710743
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781250116185

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Jonathan Franzen

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Purity

dateAdded

2015-09-14T23:34:21.12Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=569&titleID=2163660
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: NorthNet Library System (CA)
     • id: 2323

sortTitle

Purity A Novel

crossRefId

2163660

subtitle

A Novel

id

9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49

starRating

3.5

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: Purity_9780374710743_2163660
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 2768772
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374710743
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 9/1/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=9b2e1a1c-d04b-408d-b973-99b72f94fb49&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: Purity_2163660
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00UWF75RE
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 9/1/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=9b2e1a1c-d04b-408d-b973-99b72f94fb49&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: Purity_9780374710743_2163660
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 1421117
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780374710743
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 9/1/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=9b2e1a1c-d04b-408d-b973-99b72f94fb49&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Political
2. • value: Bolivia
3. • value: family life
4. • value: country
5. • value: American Authors
6. • value: detective
7. • value: postmodern
8. • value: Modern
9. • value: East Germany
10. • value: Contemporary
11. • value: Female
12. • value: Social Media
13. • value: social
14. • value: American Literature
15. • value: oakland
16. • value: murder mystery
17. • value: great American novel
18. • value: Jonathan Franzen
19. • value: purity
20. • value: postmodern literature
21. • value: postmodern fiction
22. • value: social realism
23. • value: east berlin
24. • value: internet surveillance
25. • value: best selling authors
26. • value: berlin germany
27. • value: balance of nature
28. • value: 21st century american fiction
29. • value: jonathan frazen
30. • value: jonathen franzen
31. • value: postmodern novels
32. • value: Postmodern Novel
33. • value: surveillance books
34. • value: german expatriots
35. • value: internet activists
36. • value: USA.
37. • value: rich girl murder
38. • value: thrillers about the internet
39. • value: novels about east germany
40. • value: postmodern thriller
41. • value: intelligent life forms
42. • value: intelligent observations

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Franzen, Jonathan
   • bioText: Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
   • name: Jonathan Franzen

publishDate

2015-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Purity

fullDescription

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book
"So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent" (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from "the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation" (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. 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 relationship with her mother—her only family—is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world—including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters—Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers—and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic
   • content:

     "Franzen may well now be the best American novelist. He has certainly become our most public one, not because he commands Oprah's interest and is a sovereign presence on the best-seller list-though neither should be discounted-but because, like the great novelists of the past, he convinces us that his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live . . . A good writer will make an effort to purge his prose of clichés."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
   • content: "Mr. Franzen's most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet . . . The stories of the characters in Purity zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen's determination to build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence . . . Mr. Franzen adroitly dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Leigh Haber, O Magazine
   • content: "As with all of Franzen's fiction, there is much to admire in Purity, not least what reviewer David Gates once termed 'microfelicities,' the expertly calibrated turns of phrase and pleasingly digressive cultural references and riffs around every corner. Like his last two novels, Purity bends time, easing in and out of characters' pasts and presents until, before you know it, the disparate pieces of a life suddenly fit."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 18, 2015
     Secrets are power, and power corrupts even the most idealistic in Franzen's (Freedom) exhaustive bildungsroman. Two years out of college, self-conscious, acerbic Purity "Pip" Tyler is saddled with crushing student loans and an overbearing, emotionally disturbed mother who refuses to reveal the identity of Pip's father. Living in Oakland, Calif., Pip meets and confides in beautiful German activist Annagret, who calls on her former boyfriend, Andreas Wolf, to give Pip an internship working with Wolf's cultish Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-like operation based in Bolivia. Once there, Pip is both flattered by and suspicious of the attention she receives from the magnetic Wolf; when she returns to America to do his bidding in secret, she becomes increasingly attached to people he may want to hurt. Pip strives to retain her integrity, but the world in which she is coming of age is, in Franzen's view, sick, its people born only to suffer and harm. Mining the connection between Pip and Wolf, Franzen renders half a dozen characters over the course of six decades, via extensive origin stories that plumb their psychological corners. Franzen succeeds more than he fails, but the failures are damning. At first, the mercurial, angry Pip and the arrogant, abrasive Wolf seem drawn to actively challenge the reader's sympathies. Then there are the novel's fathers, who are almost all abusive or absent, and its mothers, who are disturbed, cruel, or dumb. Gradually, it becomes clear that Franzen's greatest strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web—which includes a murder in Berlin, stolen nukes in Amarillo, and a billion-dollar trust. Though the novel lacks resonance, its pieces fit together with stunning craftsmanship. Agent: Susan Golomb, Susan Golomb Agency.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 1, 2015
     A twisty but controlled epic that merges large and small concerns: loose nukes and absent parents, government surveillance and bad sex, gory murder and fine art. Purity "Pip" Tyler, the hero of Franzen's fifth novel (Freedom, 2010, etc.), is a bright college grad with limited prospects: burdened with student debt, she lives in an Oakland squat, makes cold calls at a go-nowhere job, and can't stray far from an emotionally needy mom who won't reveal who her dad is. A German visitor, Annagret, encourages Purity to intern in Bolivia for the Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-style hacker group headed by the charismatic Andreas Wolf. Skeptical but cornered, Purity signs on. The names alone-Purity, Wolf-make the essential conflict clear, but that just frames a story in which every character is engaged in complex moral wrestling. Chief among them is Andreas, who killed Annagret's sexually abusive stepfather and has his own issues with physical and emotional manipulation. But he's not the only one Franzen dumps into the psychosexual stew. Andreas' friend Tom Aberant is a powerful journalist saddled with self-loathing and a controlling ex-wife who detests her father's wealth; Tom's lover (and employee), Leila Helou, is a muckraker skilled enough to report on missing warheads but fumbling at her own failed marriage to Charles Blenheim, a novelist in decline. In Freedom, everybody was eager to declaim moral certitudes; here, Franzen is burrowing deep into each person's questionable sense of his or her own goodness and suggests that the moral rot can metastasize to the levels of corporations and government. And yet the novel's prose never bogs down into lectures, and its various back stories are as forceful as the main tale of Purity's fate. Franzen is much-mocked for his primacy in the literary landscape (something he himself mocks when Charles grouses about "a plague of literary Jonathans"). But here, he's admirably determined to think big and write well about our darkest emotional corners. An expansive, brainy, yet inviting novel that leaves few foibles unexplored.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 1, 2016
     

     At 23, Pip is trying to pay off her enormous student loan by working at a glorified call center job. She's so poor that she stays with other squatters in a dilapidated house in Oakland, CA-so maybe Pip can be forgiven for coming across a tiny bit hostile. Unfortunately, she has developed the qualities of an emotional leech, constantly seeking approval from father figures in a pathetic attempt to fill the void left by her own unidentified father. Then two Germans show up at her house, and Pip becomes part of a decades-old tangle of stories that link her mother to her father and to the enigmatic Andreas Wolf, an East German expat with a terrifying interior life. The individual tales are epic, nonlinear chronicles that brush up against one another, leaving tantalizing traces of what remains untold. Pip's mother is a mysterious personality despite her overbearing possessiveness. And Wolf has an obsession with a journalist named Tom Aberant. All of these people are vitally connected to Pip, whose youthful mix of intelligence, cynicism, and desperate yearning will hook teens. Readers with an interest in history, politics, and the implications of social media will enjoy the characters' intellectual discourse. Recommend this extraordinary novel to teens ready for a complex yet engaging read that delivers international events and trends with the same insight as the best nonfiction but is peopled with figures who will be impossible to forget. VERDICT An exceptional introduction to fine literature for mature teen readers.-Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN

     Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2015
     Franzen follows Freedom (2010) with Purity, a novel in which his signature qualities converge in a new, commanding fluidity, from his inquiry into damaged families to his awed respect for nature, brainy drollery, and precise, resonant detail. Pip is a lonely and floundering young woman burdened with massive student debt and living with odd roommates in a derelict mansion in Oakland, California. She is exceedingly close to her mother, Anabel, a hermit of extreme sensitivity and incendiary secrets who steadfastly refuses to reveal the identity of Pip's father. Her daughter's actual name, Purity, is testament to Anabel's debilitating obsessions. Pip embarks on an internship with the Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-like group run by the charismatic Andreas Wolf, an arrogant and opportunistic East German with a shocking past. In this masterfully plotted tale populated by exceptionally complex characters caught in an ever-expanding web of startling connections and consequences, Franzen takes us to the grimly smothering world of the Stasi; franchised, feedlot-poisoned, and fracked Texas; and the Sunlight Project's Bolivian jungle hideout. As the surprising, suspenseful, archly comedic story unspools, Franzen takes measure of secrecy and transparency, altruism and selfishness, boldly paralleling the tyranny of socialism with the intrusions of the digital realm even as he asserts that nature . . . made a mockery of information technology. Franzen has created a spectacularly engrossing and provocative twenty-first-century improvisation on Charles Dickens' masterpiece, Great Expectations. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Purity will be one of the most talked about books of the season, and a national marketing campaign will fuel the buzz.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2015
     

     Does anyone have truly pure intentions, or are most people motivated by their own needs and desires? This is one of the questions posed by Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom) in his provocative new novel, a book rich with characters searching for roots and meaning in a world of secrets and lies. Pip (Purity) Tyler is burdened with college debt, a minimum-wage job, and a needy yet withholding mother who lives as a recluse under an assumed name. The identity of Pip's father is a taboo subject. Enter the shadowy, Julian Assange-like CEO of the Sunlight Project, Andreas Wolf, purveyor of all the Internet's hidden truths. With less than pure objectives, Wolf offers Pip a researcher position at his South American headquarters. An improbable sexual cat-and-mouse game between them causes a temporary drag in the narrative, but once Pip returns stateside and is embedded in the offices of an online journal, Franzen reveals moments of absolute genius. The cathartic power of tennis; the debilitating effects of jealousy; the fickle, fleeting nature of fame; and the slow death of youthful idealism are all beautifully captured. VERDICT National Book Award winner Franzen, who often decries the state of our increasingly materialistic, high-tech society via his essays and novels, this time proffers a more hopeful, sympathetic worldview. Demand will be high. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 1, 2015
     

     This new novel feels a bit different from Franzen's previous works but is still soaked in family concerns. Named Purity but called Pip, the young heroine is burdened with student debt and squatting with anarchists in Oakland, even as she shadowboxes relentlessly with her mom. After a chance encounter with a German peace activist, Pip accepts an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, which aims to unearth the world's secrets. (Maybe she'll learn who her dad is.) Charismatic Sunlight leader Andreas Wolf gets interested in Pip, as the issues veer from parenting to the war between the sexes.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      July 1, 2015
      

      Does anyone have truly pure intentions, or are most people motivated by their own needs and desires? This is one of the questions posed by Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom) in his provocative new novel, a book rich with characters searching for roots and meaning in a world of secrets and lies. Pip (Purity) Tyler is burdened with college debt, a minimum-wage job, and a needy yet withholding mother who lives as a recluse under an assumed name. The identity of Pip's father is a taboo subject. Enter the shadowy, Julian Assange-like CEO of the Sunlight Project, Andreas Wolf, purveyor of all the Internet's hidden truths. With less than pure objectives, Wolf offers Pip a researcher position at his South American headquarters. An improbable sexual cat-and-mouse game between them causes a temporary drag in the narrative, but once Pip returns stateside and is embedded in the offices of an online journal, Franzen reveals moments of absolute genius. The cathartic power of tennis; the debilitating effects of jealousy; the fickle, fleeting nature of fame; and the slow death of youthful idealism are all beautifully captured. VERDICT National Book Award winner Franzen, who often decries the state of our increasingly materialistic, high-tech society via his essays and novels, this time proffers a more hopeful, sympathetic worldview. Demand will be high. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from October 26, 2015
      In his latest, Franzen spins an intricate narrative web, which includes a murder in Berlin, stolen nukes in Amarillo, a WikiLeaks-like operation based in Bolivia, and a billion-dollar trust. Franzen renders half a dozen characters over the course of six decades, via extensive origin stories that plumb their psychological corners. The audio edition demands a great deal from its three readers, all of whom rise to the occasion in navigating Franzen’s weighty prose amid such a complex plot. Stage, screen, and audio veteran Baker, who narrated the abridged audio edition of Franzen’s The Corrections, packs a powerful punch in the middle section of the narrative, giving voice to adventurous, erudite journalist Tom Aberant and his colorful family life. Lamia shines as young Pip Tyler, a down-on-her luck recent college graduate who stumbles upon an international intrigue in her quest to solve the mysteries of her childhood. Petkoff, who comes on the scene in the later sections of the recording, does a masterly job of recalibrating characters and events from earlier in the story. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.

popularity

858

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/9b2e1a1c-d04b-408d-b973-99b72f94fb49/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

9b2e1a1c-d04b-408d-b973-99b72f94fb49

starRating

3.5

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/9B2/E1A/1C/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/9B2/E1A/1C/{9B2E1A1C-D04B-408D-B973-99B72F94FB49}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature

publishDateText

09/01/2015

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781250116185

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book
"So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent" (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from "the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation" (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. 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 relationship with her mother—her only family—is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South...

sortTitle

Purity A Novel

crossRefId

2163660

subtitle

A Novel

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC000000
   • description: Fiction / General
2. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General
3. • code: FIC084040
   • description: Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century