Publishers Weekly - May 25, 2015

Review_FICTION PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ; MAY 25, 2015 28

Former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion rei-magines Treasure Island in his new novel, The New World (reviewed on p. 31).

Purity

Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

$28 (576p) ISBN 978-0-374-23921-3

Secrets are power, and power corrupts even the most idealistic in Franzen’s (Freedom) exhaustive bildungsroman. Two years out of college, self-conscious and acerbic Purity “Pip” Tyler is saddled with crushing student loans and an overbearing, emotionally disturbed mother who refuses to reveal the identity of Pip’s father. Living in Oakland, Calif., Pip meets and confides in beautiful German activist Annagret, who calls on her former boyfriend, Andreas Wolf, to give Pip an internship at his cultish Sunlight Project, a WikiLeaks-like operation based in Bolivia. Once there, Pip is both flattered by and suspicious of the attention she receives from the magnetic Wolf; when she returns to America to do his bidding in secret, she becomes increasingly attached to people he may want to hurt.

Pip strives to retain her integrity, but the world in which she is coming of age is, in Franzen’s view, sick—its people born only to suffer and harm. Mining the connection between Pip and Wolf, Franzen renders half a dozen characters over the course of six decades, via extensive origin stories that plumb their psychological corners. Franzen succeeds more than he fails, but the failures are damning. At first, the mercurial, angry Pip and the arrogant, abrasive Wolf seem as though they’re meant to actively challenge the reader’s sympathies. Then there are the novel’s fathers, who are almost all abusive or absent, and its mothers, who are disturbed, cruel, or dumb. Gradually, it becomes clear that Franzen’s greatest strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web—which includes a murder in Berlin, stolen nukes in Amarillo, and a billion-dollar trust. Though the novel lacks resonance, its pieces fit together with stunning craftsmanship. Agent: Susan Golomb, Susan Golomb Agency. (Sept.)

Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights

Salman Rushdie. Random, $28 (304p) ISBN

978-0-8129-9891-7

In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of 1,001

Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and
action/adventure comic books. The title is
a reference to the magical stretch of time
that unites the book’s three periods,
which are actually millennia apart. In the
first period (the 12th century), jinni prin-
cess Dunia falls in love with real-life phi-
losopher and advocate of reason and sci-
ence Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) and bears
multiple children. In the second period
(current day), Dunia’s descendants, a
group including a gardener and a young
graphic novelist, are unaware of their
powerful lineage (despite the fact that
they inherited Dunia’s trademark earlobe-
lessness). Then they witness a great storm
devastating New York; worse, a slit
between the jinni world and the human
world opens and the dark jinni slip
through. The gardener suddenly finds
himself levitating, the artist hosting jinn
in his room. Dunia returns to defend the
human race by confronting her four
fiercest enemies, one by one: Zumurrud,
Zabardast, Shining Ruby, and Ra’im
Blood-Drinker. Rushdie even incorpo-
rates a third period, a far-future millen-
nium, further developing his story across
time. His magical realism celebrates the
power of metaphor, while both historic
accounts and fables are imbued with
familiar themes of migration and separa-
tion, reason and faith, repression and
freedom. Referencing Henry James, Mel
Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo
TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie
provides readers with an intellectual trea-
sure chest cleverly disguised as a comic
pop-culture apocalyptic caprice. (Sept.)

Infinite Home

Kathleen Alcott. Riverhead, $27.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-59463-363-8

Alcott’s (The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets) new novel takes place in a sprawling Brooklyn brownstone, offering a peek into the complicated lives of the tenants who have come to live in it. The inhabitants include landlord Edith, sliding into senility; Paulie, a gentle man with Williams syndrome, and his sister, Claudia, who takes care of him; Thomas, a struggling artist; and the beautiful, sensitive Adeleine. The future of these characters, and the brownstone itself, is put at risk when Edith’s money-grubbing son, Owen, attempts to foreclose the building and force the tenants out. The threat of eviction—and Edith’s slow, alarming drift from reality—inspires the tenants to seek out a way to save the property with urgency, as the story culminates in a Little Miss Sunshine–style road trip. Alcott’s writing has an acute sensory quality, and she’s at her imaginative best when describing the small, quotidian moments of her characters’ lives: when Thomas gets a headache, it takes hold “with the swift efficiency of a team of movers: whole parts of his body emptied in minutes.” The writing is dreamy and easy to inhabit, but is occasionally undermined by its tendency toward abstraction, when it would benefit more from precise plot development. Nevertheless, Alcott’s writing is generous, and her peculiar cast of characters memorable. (Aug.)