However, having turned 40, not having reached the readership he hoped for, and struggling with his third book, Franzen realised that “the only way forward was to go backwards and engage again with certain very much unresolved moments in my earlier life.” The task was “to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without collapsing into characters too much like me”.

So well-masked, elsewhere he goes as far as to call these first two novels “technically antiautobiographical”. Franzen’s clearly no stranger to the claustrophobia he describes between Aberant and Laird the fact that these sections make for some of the most horrendously and comically compelling of the book suggest he’s drawn heavily on his own experience.įranzen steered clear of “the messy business of my private life” in his first two novels – The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), the story of a female police chief, originally from Bombay, caught up in political conspiracy in St Louis and Strong Motion (1992), in which a young couple link strange earthquakes in the Boston area to corporate misconduct – only employing autobiographical material in what he described in an interview in the Paris Review as a “well-masked form”. Franzen himself was married for 14 years, to the writer Valerie Cornell, a relationship that comes across as desperately suffocating in his memoir The Discomfort Zone, in which minor squabbles result in both parties “lying facedown on the floor of our respective rooms for hours at a time, waiting for acknowledgement of our pain”.

Like all the characters in Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, Tom Aberant has a few skeletons in his closet, namely his bonkers ex-wife, Anabel Laird.

Purity franzen review