Whether it was the flap over the selection (and deselection) of his 2001 National Book Award-winning novel THE CORRECTIONS by Oprah's Book Club or the antagonism he's stirred among popular female writers like Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, it seems that Jonathan Franzen has had a knack for attracting attention for something other than the undeniable quality of his work.

Those controversies aside, his fine new novel, PURITY, should remind readers why he's easily one of the most talented American novelists working today. Showcasing both his skill at tackling big issues, like the intrusive power of new technologies or the future of investigative journalism, and his sophisticated focus on the intimate details of family life, it's a consistently entertaining work that feels far shorter than many contemporary novels half its length. 

PURITY comprises seven sections that on the surface appear to be no more than loosely linked but that in fact connect seamlessly and ingeniously to illuminate the life of Purity Tyler. Franzen's 23-year-old protagonist, known as "Pip" (in a Dickensian allusion that's obvious but never overplayed), is a "girl with nothing but problems" that include a reclusive, emotionally unstable mother, an unknown father, an oppressive load of student debt and no firm idea of how to make her way in the world.

"Showcasing both his skill at tackling big issues, like the intrusive power of new technologies or the future of investigative journalism, and his sophisticated focus on the intimate details of family life, it's a consistently entertaining work that feels far shorter than many contemporary novels half its length."

Employing a nonlinear structure, the main action of the novel traverses almost four decades --- from the late 1970s to the near present --- and is set in locations as disparate as Oakland, California, East Germany (before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall), and the Bolivian jungle where a WikiLeaks-type organization called the Sunlight Project uses the Internet --- what one character refers to without irony as the "greatest truth device ever" --- to expose political and corporate secrets.

The plot of PURITY is propelled by two principal mysteries: the identity of Pip's father and whether the truth about a long-ago murder, in whose commission and cover-up several characters are implicated, will be revealed. As immersive as those puzzles turn out to be, they're interesting principally because Franzen excels at creating memorable characters, especially female ones, whose plausibility helps elevate his storytelling above that of a conventional thriller.

In many of his public pronouncements, Franzen has expressed discomfort with, if not outright disdain for, the Internet and social media. It's no surprise, then, that he's taken an opportunity in this novel to cast these technologies in a decidedly unsympathetic light. In PURITY they're embodied in the person of Andreas Wolf, founder of the Sunlight Project, whose celebrity conceals a dark past in East Germany and whose life intersects with Pip's. Wolf is under no illusion about the scope of the power at his disposal, referring to it as "totalitarian," in the sense that it's a "system that was impossible to opt out of." And the tone of what he calls its "apparatchiks" was a "smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender" reminiscent of his life under Communist rule.

Franzen's ability to both narrow and shift his focus is best displayed in the novel's longest and most emotionally intense section, "[le1o9n8a0rd]," the only one featuring a first-person voice. There are moments when this memoir of the relationship between journalist Tom Aberant, its narrator, and Anabel Laird, a conceptual artist and heir to a corporate fortune, who meet at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s and then struggle through the early years of marriage, are so claustrophobic as to seem almost suffocating.

But for all its drama, Franzen also smartly weaves into this often bitter, sometimes shocking, reminiscence of Anabel and Tom's "two-person emotional bureaucracy," many of the novel's plot threads and themes: the sometimes troubled relations between parents and children, "the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known," the timeless wars between men and women and the continuing challenges facing modern feminists. Throughout the novel, Franzen successfully maintains the balance between compelling themes and the imperative to tell a good story, a characteristic of this novel that's as reminiscent of Dickens as anything about it.

Despite the seriousness of his concerns and the occasional dourness of his public persona, Franzen (who's described himself as a comic novelist in interviews promoting PURITY) isn't above poking some good-natured fun at that image. A blocked novelist laments the "plague of literary Jonathans," as he struggles to write the "big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon," a discussion that's been provoked by at least each of Franzen's last three novels that have clocked in at more than 500 pages.

PURITY definitely qualifies as a big book --- ambitious in its themes, sophisticated in its characterization and skilled in its pacing. In this stimulating novel, Jonathan Franzen reminds us of the power of strong fiction to both contain and explain our world.