Author: Jonathan Franzen
Published: September 2015
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Rating: ★★★1/2
By MATTHEW SIMS
Imagine knowing someone for so long that they begin to bleed into your identity. You realise that the only reason you loved them in the first place is because you ignored their worst parts and romanticised their best.
This heartbreaking reality is vividly told through various familial, sexual and eventually hostile relationships in Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. In his fifth novel since 1988, the American writer again uses personal connections to provide insights about changes in communication and technology, similar to 2001’s The Corrections and 2010’s Freedom.
Moving back and forth between various points in recent human history, including Soviet-controlled East Berlin and modern America, the story follows the interconnected lives of four people. The central crux which binds the story is the titular character Purity Tyler, “Pip”.
As a struggling 20-something who is burdened with unpaid student loans, a dead-end job and a depressed mother, all she really wants to do is find out who her father is. An opportunity presents itself in the form of an internship offer from Andreas Wolf, a German hacker hybrid of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Jumping erratically across different times, the ways in which the culturally diverse characters are connected is brilliantly exposed throughout the course of this complex journey into the horrors that time can inflict on people.
However, this deep focus on the turbulent emotions of each character and the expansion of their story leads the tale into one of telling, rather than showing. By separating the book into six parts, with each of the four major characters' stories being told in detail, Franzen alienates a wider audience by magnifying every small part of their psyche and analysing their relationships to the point of repetition and tedium.
A central bond within the narrative is that between the mother and her child: “An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to f*** with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been a person long before you had a conscious self. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.” To simplify people to their feelings about those they love often neglects the actions they take, meaning that the growth of each person is only inwardly seen by the reader.
The book’s attention to detail appeals only to those who can sit through long and indulgent passages and those interested in hack culture and journalism, but Purity is unique in its liveliness. This is not only through its prose, but through its discussions on the imperfections of the internet and the dangers of knowledge. While at times he falters into mediocrity and melodrama, Franzen has captured the lack of clarity and overwhelming nature of modern living: the impurity of life.
Author: Latika Bourke
Published: May 2015
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Rating: ★★★★
By LEAH CHAITON
When Latika Bourke heard her name in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, memories she had sought to suppress rose to the surface.
Her new biography From India With Love reveals those memories in a feel-good tale about discovering your place in the world and finding peace.
Bourke was adopted from an orphanage in India when she was eight months old. She grew up in Bathurst in a family with five biological children and three adoptees.
She is now an award-winning chief political reporter for Fairfax and a radio presenter at 2UE.
The memoir is dotted with fond childhood memories of deadly snakes and hay bales, and moves on to hilarious failed dating escapades. She wittily describes the life of an aspiring journalist determined to climb out of country bumpkin status and become the political princess we know of today (less some serious credit card debt).
But among the joyful memories are scenes of "what could have been". Haunted by her past, Latika finds herself pushed to embrace the guilt of the Indian life she might have had:
“It was much easier to focus on the belief that I was fated, destined to be a Bourke, brought up in Australia. That way I didn’t have to think about the fate I had avoided – the fate shared by so many Indian children born into poverty – and feel guilty that I had somehow escaped, feel guilty about what could have been.”
Bourke’s journey of self-discovery is illuminated by her description of the inner grappling of a successful woman in her prime. The lack of photographs and other visual aids is a miss.
It is a simple read that conveys what is written on the back: The story of how Bourke found peace with her Indian roots. That’s it. There are no surprises.
Bourke’s memoir is a tale of success in two forms: a young professional and accomplishing her dreams and a child, adopted into a loving home, who has come to terms with the guilt of leaving behind a life of poverty.
Author: Daniel Handler
Published: March 2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: ★★★★
By KIRSTI WEISZ
There’s something disturbingly ridiculous but real about the book We Are Pirates. Sailing against the current, the novel by Daniel Handler, (who wrote A series of Unfortunate Events under the pen name Lemony Snicket), offers a surreal and engrossing voyage along the coast of modern-day San Francisco that teases our desire to escape everyday life.
With a twisted sense of humour and candid delivery reminiscent of Lemony Snicket, an unidentified trespasser narrates the tale of 14-year-old Gwen Needle, whose ceaseless anger rocks the shores of her family’s domestic life. Punished for stealing candy from a drugstore, Gwen is forced to volunteer at an old age centre where she encounters the disgruntled Errol, her soon-to-be “captain”.
The pirate life tempts Gwen as she is aggravated by boredom, heartbreak and betrayal. She devises a plan to sail the high seas with a ragtag crew of ravenous outlaws. Each ruing their mundane and ostracised existence, the crew of five “scourge” San Francisco Bay as they steer towards the illusory “Treasure Island”.
There’s a personal touch to We Are Pirates. It’s based in Handler’s hometown, and his sister, who was an angry teenager, inspires Gwen’s fiery character. Handler had at one stage put the novel to one side, having struggled to depict Errol with Alzheimer’s. In a tragic coincidence, the story immersed him once again when his father was diagnosed with dementia.
The story is mixture of chilling and intrigue, which makes it a compelling read. In the narrator’s words, it’s “not a tragedy, despite its gore and its finale, and neither is it a comedy, although there is something funny”.
Beneath its light-hearted and slapstick pirate language, it explores adult themes like the dissolution of a marriage and adolescent turmoil. The plot may seem childish but the dilemmas the characters face are real and intimate. The racial undertones are particularly jarring in their unexpected delivery, with off-hand comments like “just about everybody else … in this story is white”.
A clear highlight is the darkly comedic moment in the police station when Gwen’s parents debate her whereabouts on the city map. It’s delivered through the eyes of Gwen’s father Phil Needle, who is obsessed with “the American outlaw spirit”. The scene is witty, shocking and climactic in its lead up to the poignant message that despite Phil’s desire to be “off the map”, “no one is lost in the world”.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. We Are Pirates masquerades as a children’s novel, but its target audience is too ambiguous. It leaves the reader with a confused reaction to the darker moments that unravel. And at times, the characters’ motivations are unclear and some descriptions feel irrelevant.
The end crushes confusion, though with an unanticipated revelation. The final blunt remarks imprint a sense of realisation and discomfort concerning the conflict between our loss of independence and destructive desire to be outlaws.
Like a wave “whipping” the shore, Handler drowns conventions and submerses boundaries. Even the title We Are Pirates makes a bold statement: not only do we feel displaced in the civilised world, but we also find it “so easy to steal” from others, whether it’s things or happiness.