Jonathan Franzen’s political views, as shown in his nonfiction work, tend toward the orthodox bourgeois-Bolshevik variety, and yet in his inability to delude himself about the true nature of leftists, Franzen has a streak of clarity as bright as George Orwell’s. Franzen may be a firmly committed man of the Left, but he is ruthlessly funny about his compadres.
Late in his life, George Orwell wrote, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” And yet it was also Orwell who wrote, in The Road to Wigan Pier, “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism‘ and ‘Communism‘ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” He scored Socialists for their “crankishness,” their fads, and their love of yoga. He wrote the essay, “Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun” and, in the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, described a meeting of Socialists in which his penniless protagonist remarks, “I spent three hours with seven or eight Socialists harrying me, including a South Wales miner who told me—good-naturedly, however—that if he were a dictator he would have me shot immediately.”
Orwell knew his people, and he nailed them. The same is true of Franzen, as he proves again in his immensely entertaining and sharp-eyed new novel Purity. The book is overtly political only in spots, and yet in its overall effect it’s a nearly Tom Wolfe-style flaying of the contemporary progressive personality in all of its hypocrisy, neurosis, and illogic.
A central figure in the novel is Anabel Laird, a Philadelphia art student who hopes to draw attention to the marginalization of women by wrapping her naked form in butcher paper with the words “YOUR MEAT” scrawled on it and having herself delivered to an administrator’s office. Anabel is a billionaire’s daughter who is (gradually) renouncing her family’s fortune and her birthright, just as soon as she can conquer her weakness for expensive clothes and complete her education.
Her ideological purity—she opposes the family’s industrial farming and meat business as so much slaughter and exploitation—is in reality just a sanctimonious cover for an unstable, dangerously solipsistic personality. She has, for instance, convinced herself that she can have sex only on days when the moon is full, and because she grew up rich she is so disconnected from the idea of useful employment that she expends her youth on an extravagantly self-centered art project in which she resolves to map out and film every square inch of her body with an eye toward creating a gargantuan 29-hour movie that she will never finish in the first place. She even calls her daughter Purity and, after disconnecting from her family, her ex-husband Tom, and the world, attempts to raise the girl in an unspoiled hippie wilderness of isolation.
As Orwell noted, though, utopia doesn’t mean perfect place—it simply means place that doesn’t exist. Anabel’s utopian dreams are destructive, her quest for purity a pollutant. Underlying the novel there is an unmissable conservative moral: There is no getting back to square one, there is no rejecting the world the way it is, we must build on what we have. When Anabel tells her grounded, practical, Ronald Reagan-adoring mother-in-law, “We’re not you,” the latter replies dryly, “That’s what everyone thinks. They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.” Reacting to Anabel’s knee-jerk inveighing against corporations, Tom says, “But the alternative doesn’t work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides.” For a novelist to compare the Soviet Union with ordinary, everyday institutions created by the American Left like housing projects and the Teamsters union may be counted as cheeky, maybe even a little brave.
In one passage of the novel, “The Republic of Bad Taste,” meaning East Germany, Franzen is withering about the land that (lest we forget) was held up as a model of what a state-run economy could be as recently as the mid-1980s. When a son of East Germany, defending his father’s sloppy reasoning, says, “He was the chief economist of a major industrialized nation!” his friend Tom replies dryly, “I’m understanding better why the nation failed.” East Germany is a sort of nationalized version of Anabel’s need for total centralized control and rejection of capitalism.
Liberal critics have begun to notice that their nominal ally Franzen’s message isn’t helping their cause, and they’re forlorn about it. “Even and perhaps especially when [his characters] become impassioned about liberal causes,” writes Jon Baskin in The Nation, “politics remains oddly hypothetical to them, alternately a Garden of Eden or a haunted house, and in either case a place that they are destined, like their author, to abandon.” Baskin can hardly mask his disappointment with Franzen for failing to agree that the Revolution is surely coming, if only all good progressives would stay forever on the march. Franzen is far too intelligent for that. His instincts may lead him left, but his knowledge tells him that the movement is a ship of fools.
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