An awful lot of summer blockbusters in 2014 seemed to be about young people dying. Of terminal illnesses in The Fault in Our Stars, as far as I could tell from the previews, and at one another’s hands in convoluted, dystopian competitions in The Maze Runner and the third installment of The Hunger Games. “What does it all mean?” I asked at the time, and eventually decided that the trend reflected anxieties about a discouraging economy and the dismal state of the environment.
Since then, I’ve wondered what it means that several major American novelists have likewise taken on the plight of youth in their recent work. Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child gets the point across right there on the cover, while Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, which I reviewed for these pages last February, is about a girl, neglected and untaught, who manages through love and grace to become a good wife and mother.
And now, with Purity, Jonathan Franzen has given us another novel of mothers and sons, fathers and daughters—“good parents and bad parents,” as it says on the book jacket—that traces a legacy of trauma and forgiveness through two countries and three generations. At the center of its elaborate and carefully woven plot is Purity Tyler, or Pip for short (the first of many literary allusions in the book). A recent college graduate, Pip is struggling when we meet her not to collapse under the weight of student loans, the vagaries of twenty-first-century dating, and the mystery of her own identity. Raised by an eccentric single mother in a remote cabin two hours from San Francisco, she doesn’t know who her father is, or even her mother’s real name.
