The American contingent may have missed out on this year’s Man Booker prize, but next year could be a different story after it was announced that a new novel by Jonathan Franzen, a decades and continents-spanning “multigenerational American epic”, will be released next autumn.
Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity – his first since 2010’s Freedom stormed the bestseller charts – will see the author telling the story of Purity Tyler. Known by the distinctly Dickensian name Pip, she is a young woman searching for her father, moving from America today to South America and East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s president Jonathan Galassi told the New York Times that the story “hinges on the mystery of Pip’s family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower”.
The book will be published in September 2015, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and by Fourth Estate, part of Harper Collins, in the UK. Galassi told the New York Times that Purity will be a “stylistic departure” for Franzen.
“There’s a kind of fabulist quality to it,” he told the paper. “It’s not strict realism. There’s a kind of mythic undertone to the story.”
Nicholas Pearson, Franzen’s editor in the UK at Fourth Estate, said that “at its heart, Purity is the story of a young woman searching for the father she has never met, a journey that brings her into the orbit of an outlaw-hero of the internet”.
“It’s a book about secrets: both state and corporate secrets, and the power of secrets within families, how they connect us to others and how they affect our emotional lives,” said Pearson.
“As he did in The Corrections and Freedom, Jonathan gives us characters we truly believe in and whose lives we become completely absorbed in. This time the story is told in a slightly different register to its predecessors – a realistic novel with a faint dreamlike texture. For me it is something new and bold and very thrilling,” added the editor.
The Man Booker prize opened up to writers of any nationality this year for the first time in its 46 years, looking to celebrate “the freedom of English in all its vigour, its vitality, its versatility and its glory wherever it may be”. Two US writers made the shortlist, Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler, but Australian Richard Flanagan was crowned winner last month. Franzen’s new novel will be eligible for the prize, meaning the much-acclaimed American novelist will compete for the UK’s most prestigious literary award for the first time.
Franzen is the author of four previous novels, Freedom, The Corrections, Strong Motion, and The Twenty-Seventh City, as well as two essay collections, a memoir, The Discomfort Zone, a translation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, and a translation and analysis of Karl Kraus’s essays, The Kraus Project. Freedom, Franzen’s look at the marriage of Walter and Patty Berglund, and The Corrections, set around the “last Christmas” of the fracturing Lambert family, have each sold more than a million copies in the US, according to the New York Times. The Corrections won the National Book Award in 2001.
Next autumn will also see publication of Philip Weinstein’s biography of Franzen. Book news site Publishers Lunch, reporting on its sale to Bloomsbury, said the book would explore “Franzen’s metamorphoses as a person and as a writer – from his ultra-sensitive childhood through his Swarthmore [school] years, his troubled marriage, and his tumultuous self-reappraisal during the 1990s, up to his arrival on the mainstream cultural scene as a literary icon”. Subtitled The Comedy of Rage, it is being written with the novelist’s approval, according to Weinstein, who told the New York Times: “He liked the idea.”
“It’s not an exposé of Jonathan Franzen,” he added. “It doesn’t pretend to be a full-scale biography. It’s too early for that. He’s in full career mode. Someone later, a generation from now, will do that biography. It’s a report on who he is.”
