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I have a very ambiguous attitude to Jonathan Franzen. On the one hand, I recognise his great skills as a novelist - in particular, characterisation, use of authentic protracted dialogue, intricate and skilful plotting. But, on the other, I never find his novels satisfying as a whole.
'Purity' is no exception. I thought my view might change after the first hundred pages. I found Pip (Purity) Tyler a feisty and fascinating character and her story zinged along. Similarly, I thought Andreas Wolf (although a bit too similar to Julian Assange) was engaging and his back story, growing up and working for a charity in East Berlin, was one of the best parts of the book. However, (and there's always a however or but with Franzen) the clever interweaving of characters, stories and time frames increasingly challenged my attention span (and this is a long novel!)
In the end, it is not a novel about the very modern issues of privacy and the journalistic search for truth which it seemed to be at first (Andreas Wolf's Wikileaks-type organisation only features as background). Instead, it's a novel about relationships and how and why they fail. My problem is that too many of these relationships are too similar (not only between partners but also between parents and children (Philip Larkin's "they fuck you up your mum and dad" could have been Franzen's dedication). The bickering between Tom and Anabel seemed to go on forever.
I probably won't give up on Franzen because I'm sure he has a great novel in him but I'm not holding my breath in expectation.