Purity is a novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. His fifth novel, it was published on 1 September 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The novel is composed of six sections that focus on several different characters and tells the tale of Purity "Pip" Tyler and her quest to discover her biological father, leading her towards Andreas Wolf, a German-born hacker based in Bolivia, and Tom Aberant, an editor and journalist based in Denver.
Plot summary
The novel tells the intersecting stories of several different people of widely diverging ages and backgrounds.
Purity in Oakland
Purity Tyler, who goes by the name "Pip" is 23 and has $130,000 in student loan debt. She was raised by her reclusive mother Penelope in Felton, California, south of the Bay Area. The two have a unique and co-dependent relationship with her mother refusing to tell Pip anything about her father or even her previous life including Penelope's real name and age. Pip works as a telemarketer for a company selling dubious green-energy schemes and lives in a communal squat rent-free because of her secret love for a married man named Stephen. After impressing one of the visitors to the squat, a beautiful German anti-nuclear activist, Annagret, she is recruited for The Sunshine Project, a fictional competitor to WikiLeaks, headquartered in Bolivia run by a man named Andreas Wolf. Pip is uninterested in joining the project, but after she makes a romantic advance on Stephen, who rejects her as he thinks of her as a daughter-figure, Pip decides to leave the squat and her job. After asking her mother a final time to help her meet her father so she can try to get him to help with her student loans, Pip decides to go to work for Andreas Wolf, who Annagret has informed her is capable of tracking down her father.
The Republic of Bad Taste
In 1987 Andreas Wolf is 27 and living in East Germany where he acts as a youth councillor for a church, routinely having sex with the teenage girls he councils. When one of the girls refuses to have sex with him in the church he brings her to his estranged parents' dacha where he is caught by local police and told never to return. Andreas falls into bitterness. Sometime later he meets a troubled fifteen-year-old, Annagret who is spending her nights at the church because her step-father has begun sexually abusing her. As her mother is a nurse who is addicted to drugs and has been stealing them and her step-father, Horst, is a low-level Stasi informant, Annagret does not feel that she can report the abuse as one or both of her parents will be imprisoned thus ruining her life. Andreas does not know what to do to protect Annagret and offers to kill Horst. Annagret is initially dismissive of the idea but after a few days changes her mind. Andreas tells Annagret to lure her step-father to his parents' dacha and reminisces about his childhood.
Born to an English literature professor and a high-level official in the East German government, he is indulged as a child due to his intelligence and good looks. However as he grows older he realizes that his life is a facade. His mother suffers bouts of depression and is also sexually promiscuous. When Andreas is a teenager he is sent to a psychiatrist ostensibly due to his excessive masturbation. In reality Andreas is suffering depression after a "ghost" approached him and told him that he was Andreas' actual father, a former graduate student of his mother's with whom she had a long love affair. Andreas continues to act as a perfect child, but when he is twenty he begins to write poetry. When a poem of his is published which contains an obscene and treasonous acrostic he is protected from jail by his parents but warned that he must either complete the army service he has been avoiding or become estranged from them. Andreas chooses estrangement.
Back in 1987 Andreas goes through with killing Annagret's step-father. He is surprised when his crime is not uncovered, but eventually comes to believe his father is protecting him.
Two years later as the Berlin Wall is about to come down and Wolf is afraid his crime will be exposed as the Stasi files are unsealed, Andreas approaches his father and arranges for one last favor with the party. Wolf gets access to his Stasi records and those of Annagret's step-father. While trying to leave with his records he is almost caught before he runs into television cameras and denounces the government, quickly becoming a celebrity dissident, shining "sunlight" on the state's secrets. He then meets an American journalist, Tom Aberant.