MixedToronto Star (CAN)Purity marries characters of lifelike quirkiness with up-to-the-minute social commentary ... The wisdom and insights are often bracing, the writing punctuated by nifty metaphors ... But for me it ultimately wasn’t as satisfying as his last two novels. Franzen’s large-scale exploration of ideological purity and compromise feels a tad déjà vu ... Purity seems grimmer even than Franzen’s substantially—if reasonably—grim previous novels ... Purity\'s critique of the digital world felt overwrought to me ... Still, much of Purity is engaging and brilliant. Few contemporary authors make characters as vitally alive and heartbreaking in their failures as Franzen does. However flawed, his new novel is still a work to be reckoned with.
