Purity and Impurity in Jonathan Franzen’s "Purity"

Depending on your definition of masterpiece, this novel might just be one. Pip needs love, money, and her dad’s identity—not necessarily in that order. Impurities and all, I want everyone to read it. So I won’t divulge any of its many secrets. Want the actual plot? Read this book!

It’s not perfect. In crystals, impurities alter the basic structure, adding color and fire; this describes Franzen as well. Some reviewers attack these distortions: self-indulgence, sexism, oversimplification, snobbishness, one-dimensional protagonists, and disconnected narrative threads.

There’s more. Tension can be as low as breadth is huge. The remarkable characterization occurs less from action than backstory. Lots and lots of “telling.”

Maybe. But here’s what else Purity offers:

~ Zingers.

 “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.”

~ Analogy.

“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

~ Insight.

“And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.”

~ Irony.

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”

~ The “extra” in “extraordinary”:

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was.”

~ Voice.

“The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the inerconnecteness of all possible smells was not apparent….How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics?”

In an NPR interview, Franzen describes fiction-writing as expertly as he describes everything else: “It’s like having this dream that you can go back to, kind of on demand. When it’s really going well...you’re in a fantasy land and feeling no pain.”

You’ll need chutzpah to create that kind of “ fantasy land.” Here’s the thing about risk. Take none, and “good” is the most you’ll get. Defy “pure” convention, and you might fail; you might inspire loathing as well as adoration. Personally, I pray that Franzen keeps doing his own thing.

Tip: Too much risk is—risky. But none at all? No color or fire there.

Turkey or Tofu, Tenderness, and—Tension

Whatever your personal protein, your novel needs both the fondness and frustration that describes any family gathering. The interplay between those? That makes novels tick.

Holidays expose the best and worst in everyone, including novelists. The bigoted uncle, the family mythology about who’s smart or successful, the Brussels Sprouts with cinnamon (?)—fodder for Charles Baxter’s observation that “Hell is story friendly.”

Yet fiction always needs a touch up, whether describing Thanksgiving or anything else. Colum McCann believes that “literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.”

Those stories range from those living on the brink, in the streets, or simply starved for the Norman Rockwell painting we worry that everyone else is enjoying.

Tip: Tension resides in the irony between expectation and reality.

Some novelists enjoy adding tension as much as encountering Aunt Agatha, who blissfully reminds you that you’ve neither published nor married. What’s wrong with you?

That’s tension all right, and as Jodie Renner reminds, “All genres of fiction, not just thrillers, suspense novels, and action-adventures, need tension, suspense, and intrigue to keep readers eagerly turning the pages.”

Ready to write fiction as rich in tension as holiday food has calories? Here’s how:

~ Desire.

            That starts it all. Someone wants something apparently unattainable.

~ Change.

            That desire involves giving something up, even if it’s only the harbor of the familiar.

~ Twist.

Corey would like to be rich and adore everyone in her family. Yawn. Wouldn’t we all? Astonish us with how Corey’s longing both resembles and differs from everyone else’s.

~ Secret.

No one cares that Corey salted the filling instead of the caramel crust. But planning to offer herself to her brother-in-law? That’s a secret, like what you deliberately omit:

what creates tension . . . is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things. – Raymond Carver

Yes, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Leo Tolstoy). Fiction needs idiosyncrasy, universality, and tension. That needn’t deter renewed hope that the next holiday will exceed your expectations. And why not? The cycle continues...

Angle, Emphasis, and Insight

What do you want readers to see? Perhaps you seek a kind of photographic realism, with the proportions between background and character, acuity and obscurity resembling what we see every day. Maybe, however, you want more—want readers to view the world from a different vantage point in order to reach new perception, new conclusions.

Tip: To change your reader’s perspective, you must first change your own.

Albert Einstein said that to solve a problem, you must alter your approach to it—that something must shift to allow new insight. That’s what a device called the camera obscura once provided. This precursor of Kodak is a dark chamber that reversed the image visible on the other side.  Some theorize that 17^th century Dutch Masters like Vermeer used it to study the world upside down, in order to gain greater control of detail via altered perception. Tracy Chevalier describes this exquisitely in Girl with a Pearl Earring.

If you’d like to change your perspective without a camera obscura, what might you do?

~ Listen.

Many of the best novelists are more interested in what others have to say than in their own thoughts, which they already know. And opinions that make you queasy are likely among the most useful. What better way to explore other belief systems?

~ Ask questions.

Why does this person believe what she believes? How does he compartmentalize that way? Not all your characters are like you (!),  so you need a way to understand those who aren’t.

~ Broaden your horizons.

Seen any good paintings lately? Even if art isn’t your thing, a quick web foray can do lots to present the world through lenses rose-colored and otherwise. Some suggestions:

• In Felix Vallotton’s “The Ball,” greenery gets far more precedence than figures or objects. Doesn’t that raise a lot of questions? Which ones?

• “Christina’s  World,” by Andrew Wyeth, again emphasizes landscape. The disabled woman is unable to walk to the farmhouse, which is some distance away. What does the painting reveal about her? About her world? About your own?

• “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” said Rene Magritte, who painted a man painting a woman on the woman, a mirror functioning in reverse of a camera obscura,  a room-sized apple,  a locomotive suspended beneath a mantelpiece. All are true in the details—just not the relationships. What does that say? How are fiction and surrealism related?

Change how you see—what you see—and you can change the view for your readers. Toy with proportion, reversal, emphasis, and irony. Nothing will look quite the same. Isn’t that inherent in the word “fiction”?

A Rose in a Cornfield Is a…

…weed. Misplaced, the most exquisite, evocative addition feels like…a mistake.

We’ve all experienced it:  “What a sentence! I love it! I can’t even believe I wrote it! Must’ve come directly from the Muse.” And yet, if you can’t find the right location for that fantastic sentence, you must let it go.

It helps to view your novel as a limited area of ground. You want to make the most of every inch, not let things that don’t belong there insidiously sneak in.

Don’t

…realize that readers need to know something and leave it wherever you happened to think of it.

…interrupt the action with distracting backstory or description. Note that distraction differs from

slowing down—teasing out suspense. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate.

…weigh down your story with detail that feels as relevant as Aunt Agatha’s best friend’s grandma’s traditional recipe for last-till-spring Christmas Fruitcake.

…add a brief passage about the Galapagos Islands because you did lots of research on it and long to share your discoveries about marine iguanas and Blue-Footed Boobies.

Do

…add “set up” just prior to “pay off,” so readers never wonder why they heard about this.

…limit details to those which enhance plot, deepen characterization, or foreshadow themes.

…make details “double-duty”: they advance plot while setting scene, or they add scenery while suggesting atmosphere, contribute irony to the plot, and so on.

…use transitions so readers can grasp the connections between details that might be linked only in the author’s mind.

…use stage business, or character gesture or behavior, to support the dialogue.

…remember that flowers set seeds. In fiction or soil, they grow wherever they happen to fall.

It’s easy to delete clumsy sentences, boring references, and paragraphs that go nowhere. Far harder is realizing that you’ve written something really good and have nowhere to put it. But whatever doesn’t add subtracts. Aren’t you willing to make hard sacrifices for your readers?

Tip: A great sentence or detail in the wrong place is a…rose in a cornfield.

How Are Sherman Alexie and Steven Colbert Alike?

Wherever you are politically, you probably find the other side naively misguided or dangerously evil. You probably have at least one friend on the other side. What to do?

Tip: Laughter just might be the quickest route to compassion, healing, and insight.

Alexie and Colbert are both comedians of many trades, but comparing a pundit to a novelist feels like comparing “truthiness” to facts. Yet here they both are on conflict in America:

It’s like this white-Indian thing has gotten out of control. And the thing with the blacks and the Mexicans. Everybody blaming everybody...I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it all. Just look around at the world. Look at this country. Things just aren’t like they used to be. – Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer

Let’s all go back to the good old days! Here’s another.

Join me in standing up against any actual knowledge about guns. Let the CDC know they can take away our ignorance when they pry it from our cold dead minds. – Stephen Colbert

Or on homophobia from a devout Catholic:

Christianity is the best way to cure gayness — just get on your knees, take a swig of wine, and accept the body of a man into your mouth. – Stephen Colbert

            and

My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. “Jeez,” she said, Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?” – Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

What’s this got to do with your fiction?

~ The angrier you are, then the more you need to understate.

~ The angrier you are, then the more you need irony.

~ The more you want people to listen, then the more you need to make them laugh. at least 

    sometimes.

Novels change us by clarifying the issues. Ranting only divides, as does oversimplifying characters into heroes or villains. As Colbert put it, “That’s why I don’t think I could ever stop doing what I’m doing, because I laugh all day long and if I didn’t I would just cry all day long….I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it’s more than that. It’s an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids.” Here’s to our health.

Compassion and Characterization

People admire compassion. We love stories of other mammals protecting their offspring—and ours. We’re all for compassion, though sometimes more theoretically than literally. And this reality impacts both the characters we create and reader response to the characters we create.

For example, evaluate your feelings for this character from Emma Straub’s The Vacationers: “Franny always wanted to carry in the most impressive-looking dish, no matter that everyone knew she’d cooked everything on the table.”

The sentence probably doesn’t encourage you to like her much. But what if, after thirty-five years of marriage, her husband just slept with a twenty-three year old? And, worse, that it’s common knowledge in her circle and at his former job? Our response changes, because no one’s immune to betrayal, vulnerability, the nightmare of public humiliation.

Characters aren’t just what they do, but also why they do it. In Ian McEwan’s Solar, protagonist Michael Beard gets divorced five times, has endless affairs (simultaneously), lies about his politics, steals research, and frames his wife’s boyfriend for murder.

There’s no one to love in this novel, yet it works from beginning to end. Some of that’s great writing. The rest? A little empathy for Michael Beard, who “had to have his wife back, and dared not drive her away with shouting or threats or brilliant moments of unreason. Nor was it in his nature to plead. He was frozen, he was abject, he could think of nothing else.”

When a character, however egocentric, resonates with the egocentricity each of us strives to quell, we respond not with contempt but compassion. Both inside fiction and out, we react very differently when we understand why so-and-so behaved that way. We react very differently when we have lots of information instead of merely what’s obvious.

What’s that got to do with you as a novelist?

~ Have your characters yearn, because that’s so human. But never let them whine, because that’s so annoying!

~ Include backstory not because you did your “writing homework.” Help readers understand character motivation. That’s the only reason for backstory.

~ Make your characters screw up. Then either let them save themselves or let your readers wish the characters could.

~ Play with irony. Readers enjoy predicting a particular outcome. Later? Reveal that the truth lies elsewhere.

~ Use your most private emotions. Those are everyone’s most private emotions.

Tip: Supply enough insight to surprise readers with how much compassion they feel—and for whom.

Private Jokes Are No Joking Matter

Did you hear the one about the hen at the hectic intersection? Yawn. The only thing funny about a well-worn comic moment is someone thinking it’s funny. But genuinely “funny”? That matters. It doesn’t just give novels depth and texture beyond basic plot and theme. Humor makes novels better simply because everybody likes to laugh. And private jokes are the best of all.

So. Take a second to picture yourself with a spouse, partner, or dear friend roaring with laughter over—something hilarious only to the two of you. This is a special kind of funny. Whether slapstick, witty, subtle, or all of the above, it feels personal. No one else quite gets it. That’s the point.

Personal humor (or anything else for that matter) is special. It feels slightly illicit, which most of us find sensual. A private joke involves a clique, if only of two, so it’s exclusive. In-group humor depends on insider information and is thus a commodity. All great, but can you do that in your novel? Of course.

~ Set the scene.

Bad jokes inundate with context. Decent jokes offer almost enough. Great jokes hint what the audience needs to know, preferably in advance and just clearly enough to command attention without being obvious.

~ Plant seeds.

Good jokes, in fiction and everywhere else, build slowly, often in three’s: A vague reference, a slightly more pointed one, then—whomp!—the punchline.

~ Use slightly esoteric references.

If you never ask readers to stretch for dim recollections about Paul Bunyan, Walter Cronkite, the Uncertainty Principle, or Teddy Roosevelt, then no private joke is possible. Private jokes depend on a somewhat arcane reference clicking into place.

~ Suggest rather than state character behavior.

Forget those tedious assumptions about prom queens or neurosurgeons. Instead, give your astronaut or whatever traits that plot forces to the surface. Humor flourishes with the surprise of foiled expectations.

~ Use the five senses.

A good joke is not just something you hear or read, but one you can at least visualize, and, ideally, connect with viscerally.

~ Mix and match.

Blend graphics, word play, irony, and burlesque. Besiege us in more than one way and—we’ll love your book all the more for the fun we’re having.

Tip: Charm your readers not just with public jokes but private ones.