![]() (There’s also a fairly elaborate conspiracy plot.) ![]() “There’s a murder,” Franzen said when asked about this, insisting he wasn’t spoiling the book by saying so because an excerpt will appear in the New Yorker next week. The book also departs, a bit, from the realistic mode of his last two novels, The Corrections and Freedom, insofar as it has rather more action than one came to expect from those other two, some kind of heightened narrative energy that borders on postmodernism. It’s like, I consider it an act of courage to say the name of my novel is Purity.” “I don’t know why I chose to put that title on the book and I kept wishing I could come up with a better one, because there’s something vaguely icky about ‘purity’.” He went on: “Just the letters P-U-R, there’s something about them. ![]() He seemed, on some level – perhaps unconscious – to be responding to those who have written critically about his gender politics, and perhaps even to those who had sharp comments about the title, which he had his doubts about. “Her name is on the cover,” Franzen said of Pip, but “I would find it a little creepy if I’d written an entire book about a young woman.” And therefore, he added, “I am at pains to stress that half the book is from a male point of view.” Franzen told Miller he actually thinks of the book as having four protagonists. ![]()
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