A Novel of Big Ideas, or merely a Big Novel? 
 It may sound strange to say so, but Jonathan Franzen writes one of those big blockbuster novels that you used to get in airports. The kind that can say "From the slums of Oakland to the jungles of Bolivia," or "Spanning a turbulent half-century from STASI-era East Germany to the age of WikiLeaks." Or perhaps "A story of murder and atonement and a daughter's search for the father she never knew." There is something big, bold, and Dickensian about this novel, which abounds in at least apparent coincidence and is just slightly over the top. Of course it is a modern novel too, written with the satirist's keen eye on the political scene, and with its full share of sex. Until it began to bog down around 400 pages in, I found it hugely absorbing to read and finished it in record time. Franzen notoriously rejected the popularizing power of Oprah Winfrey for his first novel on this scale, The Corrections, but made amends with his second one, Freedom. Given a similar launch, it would be hard not to see Purity as a popular best-seller too. 
 But Franzen would shudder to be seen as a mere hack. He is an elegant writer, capable of magnificent prose. His social commentary seldom makes the mistake of being one-sided. And he is fiendishly clever, as unfortunately he reminds us once too often. Let me give examples of all three: 
 -- Here is a fine example of Franzen's lyricism and exquisite observation, the prelude to his final section, "The Rain Comes," (and surely a tribute to the famous opening of Dickens' Bleak House): Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away. There are similar glories throughout the book. 
 -- In an earlier section, Franzen etches an acid portrait of the Texas panhandle: To drive east on Amarillo Boulevard was to pass, in quick succession, the high-security Clemens Unit prison complex, the McCaskill meat-processing facility, and the Pantex nuclear weapons plant, three massive installations more alike than different in their brute utility and sodium-vapor lighting. In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aquifer. Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country. Ouch! But what I really admire is that he doesn't leave it like that. In the next paragraph, he describes how the driver, an investigative reporter, ...still loved the whole state, not just San Antonio and the Gulf-softened winters and the burning green of the mesquite in spring but [...] the embrace of ugliness; the eager manufacture of it; the capacity of Texan pride to see beauty in it. And the exceptional courtesy of the drivers, the enduring apartness of the old republic, the assurance of being a shining example to the nation. 
 -- Franzen is a linguist, and the book is peppered with untranslated dialogue in Spanish and German, which is fine for conveying atmosphere but may annoy less fluent readers. In particular, he seems driven to show off his skill with German. One of the leading characters, a young dissident named Andreas Wolf, refers to himself as an Assibrauteaufreisser. Google it, and you'll find nothing. But from what I can figure, it is both a political pun and a somewhat risque description that is nonetheless highly relevant to his character at that stage of the book--so why not use English? ["Ossi booty-snatcher," perhaps?] Andreas creates a scandal by submitting a bilingual poem to a literary magazine. Called "Muttersprache / Mother Tongue" it is apparently an English poem with a parallel translation. But those who know German will see that the two do not match, and that the whole thing contains a scurrilous Oedipal theme. And those that pick up on the hint that comes only several pages later, will notice an obscene political statement woven into the opening letters of each line, German in the English version, and English in the German one. Brilliantly clever--but who on earth is going to get all that without prompting? 
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 As in his other big novels, Franzen writes in large sections of around 75 pages or so. Each occupies a different place and time, and for a while seems to concern different characters. So we have the attractive female protagonist, Pip (short for Purity) Tyler, living in a squat in Oakland, trying to pay off college loans while getting a life. Then we are in the old German Democratic Republic, with Andreas Wolf living in a church basement, counseling (and seducing) at-risk girls. Thirty years later, Andreas has become a world figure in the manner of Julian Assange, and Pip will join his team at a Shangri-La valley in Bolivia as an intern. One of her motives is that Wolf offers her research skills to help find her father; her mother lives as a recluse in the Santa Cruz Mountains and will tell her nothing about her past. One interesting thing about the structure is that successive sections jump back and forward in time, filling in details from other decades over the forty-year span. I found, however, that this eventually becomes annoying. The earlier parts of the book depend largely on character and action. But the last third bogs down into obsessively-dissected psychology, often expressed in terms of sexual preferences. My reaction to this is not prudish--a good erotic scene can be hard to find--but I fail to see much connection between the kind of sex a person prefers and his or her moral place in the world. 
 Moral, yes. Purity is more than a given name; it is also of course Franzen's title and would-be theme. The main reason for Pip's mother's flight is her obsessive desire to free herself from anything that she considers tainted, even if it will plunge her and her daughter below the poverty line. Andreas heads an organization called The Sunlight Project, whose aim is to bring dirty secrets to light, but he himself has a dirtier secret than anything that can be revealed in public. There is a lot of philosophical talk about whether the internet is inherently pure or dirty; these were the only parts I found myself skimming. The moral equation comes up again and again, but I felt it more as a Leitmotiv than as a theme to be teased out and developed. Even when Franzen steers this juggernaut to a more-or-less settled ending, it seems a little too easy, too little connected to the moral themes he has brought up at every opportunity. 
 Near the beginning of the book, Pip is about to make love with a young man when she remembers she has left her condoms downstairs. On the way back up, she gets sidetracked by another resident in the squat. She returns to her room to find her date dressed and texting: "Coitus interruptus maximus! 62 min and counting!!" He doesn't know half of it; there will be 500 more pages to get through yet. But highly enjoyable ones. For the most part.