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100 pages to go (and I will finish) and reading a review in the LA Book Review despite trying to avoid all press, sums up my experience.

What darkens Purity and weakens its realist musculature is Franzen’s atavistic treatment of male and female character. In Purity’s calculus, men are predators, women prey, and rape an inevitable aspect of being. We are asked to regard the male characters� sexual urges � including rape, incest, pedophilia, the consumption of brutal pornography, and acts of murder � as biological prerogatives unjustly targeted by 20th-century feminism. Franzen has run afoul of feminism in his capacity as a public intellectual, and there is a separate, important argument to be made about the brashly trumpeted impieties of a privileged author. There is also much to be said about Franzen’s novel as an artifact of our historical moment, when sexual violence is a global and national epidemic. But let us acknowledge first that Purity’s sexual attitudes cripple its narrative artistry. The novel’s pervasive antifeminism interferes with both the wide-angle lens and the pointillist detail necessary to Franzen’s formal-historical ambitions. Were male sexual violence and female self-abnegation confined to specific characters in this polyvocal work, they could invite alternate frames of reference for judging key events and conflicts. But the unvarying primacy of male desire deadens the very pulse of story, unkind to our curiosity about the circumstances of Pip’s birth, the impact of Andreas Wolf’s power-toppling leaks, the future of Tom and Leila’s partnership.

Like Tom, Purity’s other male characters resent feminism’s artificial, misguided interventions into their private “motives.� Forced to reconstitute their natural desires as cultural crimes, Franzen’s multigenerational, polyglot men find solidarity in a fantasy voiced by Andreas Wolf: “What if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?� Depravity with impunity: in reducing men to this dull fantasy and women to its antagonists, Franzen cheapens the character-rich achievements of the authors � not only Dickens, but also Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, O’Connor � he claims to emulate.

In a 2010 New York Times review of Freedom, Sam Tenenhaus asked rhetorically, “Assaultive sex reverberates through Freedom, and why not?� Why not, indeed? Not because misogyny and good writing are, or should be, mutually exclusive. But because in Franzen’s hands, complicated sex lacks Nabokov’s poetry, Coetzee’s philosophy, Naipaul’s somberness, and Roth’s exuberance. Because episode after episode of rape limits Purity’s literary scope, reducing characters to pseudo-primitive desires rather than illustrating their full humanity. Because a novelist who criticizes experimental literature’s inadequate attention to character has brought a disheartening sameness to Purity’s ostensibly diverse men and women. And finally, because Purity’s antifeminism is fatal to the arc of growth that defines the bildungsroman. At her journey’s outset, Pip “fantasized about submitting and obeying,� telling Andreas Wolf, “I think I may have a slave personality� and imploring him, “Give me an order. Say I have to do journalism.� At the novel’s end, Pip still “wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all.� So dangerous is the prospect of female autonomy that Purity denies its protagonist the independence that Dickens bequeathed to his Pip.

Over the week i have read it, I have felt angry and most of all kind of dirty, but I read it -- which I need to think about, obviously.