Purity

Lots of people love to hate Franzen, but I don't really care one way or the other. What matters is the work, and this book is brilliant. Long, yes, but brilliant. It's the story of Purity Tyler and also the story of purity–mostly in the false sense because of universal moral ambiguity. Purity, nicknamed Pip, changes deeply over the course of the novel, in the way a reader ought to find satisfying–all of that against a backdrop of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the rise of the great leakers of our time.

I have mixed feelings about Purity, because the book is told from different characters' points of view. And my problem was that I loved some and disliked some (and one character I hated so much I wanted to murder her with a blunt instrument). Some of the sections I disliked were necessary for the plot, but I wish they'd been trimmed down to the bare essentials.

Solid

This is definitely the most high-brow book Worst Bestsellers has done. There were parts of this that were enjoyable and well-done, but overall Franzen's Woman Problem cannot be ignored...

For 90 anguished minutes on this book:

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-35-purity/