And I actually liked it. I liked it better than Freedom, the book it displaced on my bookshelf. Granted, I might be biased as a big chunk of it is set in my wife's hometown (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, is not exactly the most literarily visited of places, the only author I know that has written about it was Mario Vargas Llosa, but that doesn't count as he lived right next door!).
I don't think anything will ever come close to The Corrections, but Purity has enough flashes of genius to remind the reader of how amazing a writer Franzen can be. Said flashes of genius (first among them Andreas Wolf's first TV interview outside the Stasi archives) are enough to make one overlook some unpredictable turns of events that are actually not so unpredictable.
The penultimate chapter (The Killer) felt absolutely eternal, and I do think Franzen could have shaved a fair few pages from the 563 of the book, but it remained a great read to end 2019. Also, this book is so very reflective of his disdain and disregard for a number of contemporary developments and trends, and to me it appears clear that Tom Aberant is in the end his favourite character.
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