But their dealings were all tainted by moral hazard, a useful phrase she’d learned in college economics. It wasn’t as if Pip felt good about making fun of her mother. Here’s how he represents her consciousness as she reflects on her ambivalence toward her rather needy mother: He’s introducing one of his protagonists, Purity Tyler, a 23-year-old who goes by the nickname Pip. Difficult,” an essay published in The New Yorker in 2002, he disavowed formal experimentation, asserting that novels ought to be “conservative and conventional” and should aspire to induce feelings of “pleasure and connection” in a democratic audience.ĭespite these renunciations, however, Franzen’s prose is alive with intelligence, and on the first page of his new novel, Purity, a reader can see his mind at work on a task at which he excels: showing the way people think. In “Perchance to Dream,” an essay published in Harper’s in 1996, he wrote of giving up what he called “the burden of newsbringing”-the duty that he had formerly felt to instruct readers about what was wrong with their world. For a number of years now, Jonathan Franzen has forsworn the most obvious ways of showing off intellect in fiction.
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