Novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom, will speak at the Blair School’s Ingram, Hall on Wednesday, September 23, talking about his new novel, Purity.
Tickets are $33.50, which includes a copy of the book. Tickets are available through the Salon@615 website.
Discounted student tickets are available for just $5, and the ticket price may be applied toward the purchase of the book, if you wish. You must show your student ID at the door. Student tickets may be purchased in advance online or at the door.
Franzen appears as part of the Salon@615 author series, as part of the Blair School’s partnership with Parnassus Books, the Nashville Public Library and Humanities Tennessee.
About Purity:
Purity is a magnum opus for our morally complex times from Jonathan Franzen, the author of Freedom and The Corrections. Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother — her only family — is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world — including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a dark-hued comedy of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. Franzen has created yet another cast of vividly original characters, Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Jonathan Franzen is a major author of our time, and Purity is his edgiest and most searching book yet.