Purity

Lots of people love to hate Franzen, but I don't really care one way or the other. What matters is the work, and this book is brilliant. Long, yes, but brilliant. It's the story of Purity Tyler and also the story of purity–mostly in the false sense because of universal moral ambiguity. Purity, nicknamed Pip, changes deeply over the course of the novel, in the way a reader ought to find satisfying–all of that against a backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the rise of the great leakers of our time.