Slate Takes on PURITY
The Slate Audio Book Club is back, this time discussing Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample).
Calling it a big, sweeping, Dickensian novel, the Slate critics, Meghan O’Rourke, Parul Sehgal, and Katy Waldman, jump into a conversation about the core of the novel and its message.
While the central character, a woman named Pip, should serve as the novel’s heart, all the participants agree that it is the mothers in the story that power its interest, saying that those characters offer a creepy sensibility that provides “a range of tones from horror to simmer” and become the most fascinating part of the story.
The group also discusses the portrayal of women and the ways the men operate in the novel, accusing Franzen of failing the Bechdel;Wallace test.
Each ends up recommending the novel, despite clear flaws, saying they admire Franzen’s ambition and his ability to identify questions readers need to address. However, they say that this is not the book to start reading Franzen – for that they suggest The Corrections.
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Next month the book club will explore Lucia Berlin’s short-story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women, which was featured on a number of the year-end best books lists.