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Superb. Just superb. Franzen managed to write a book that, at the same time:

- is as gripping as a page-turner
- is funny
- has a lot of big things to say about people and today's world: idealism, the internet, secrets
- has more psychological insight than a psychiatry manual.

A New York Times review said that Purity "...depends more on story than on style. It can seem, in fact, as though there is a battle going on in the novel between the slackness of its style and the amount of sharp detail and careful noticing, especially regarding Pip’s role as a damaged innocent in need of rescue and redemption. Most of the time, there is something oddly invisible about the style, so that you do not notice it as the plot moves from event to event."

I'm not sure I agree with this, though. Having read The Corrections and Freedom, I did notice that in Purity there are less stylistic acrobatics than in those two books, but my feeling is that this is not a "slackness of style", but rather a positive evolution on Franzen's part, like that of a consumed performer who is not wasting his time with showy numbers anymore: he gets right to the meat of the show, and does it extraordinarily well.

Above all, this book is a constant and entertaining outpouring of clever paragraphs that kept me engaged and stimulated. As a personal note, I have to say that Franzen’s intelligence feels sometimes too cold for my personal taste. Yes, there is some heart in this novel, but the heart is not at the center of it all. The head is.

I’m not lamenting the lack of sentimentalism, of course. That’s not what I look for in a book. I’m thinking more of something that stirs your soul, that warms or breaks your heart... not much of that in Franzen’s work at all.

Yes, there are a lot of feelings, but the negative and toxic ones far outweigh the positive ones. From an emotional standpoint, discomfort, ickiness and general negativity are the feelings that dominate the novel. “Purity� is peopled with chilling, creepy personalities.

Or, to put it another way: not only Franzen’s characters (especially mothers!) lack any ability to relate to other people in a normal way, they also lack many degrees of human warmth and therefore they are even more difficult to empathize with.

Often, while reading the book, I had the clear impression of a brilliant scientist (Franzen) who is working in his laboratory rather than someone who has great empathy and warmth.

This is not a good or a bad thing per se. As a reader, you often can feel the writer's personality sift through the pages, and Franzen's personality, although clearly very complex, seems to be dominated by his left brain hemisphere, if this means anything at all to anyone.

And I might be wrong about Franzen, because you can write in a cold way and still have a very warm side that you keep to yourself, but that’s the thing: in Franzen’s novels, as sublime as they are, the heart never soars, it never sings. It’s always about the brain.

The same general criticism that I’ve found about David Foster Wallace (who was his good friend) can be applied to Franzen: their work lacks heart.

These are only my thoughts, I know I might be epically off track in this assessment.