Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series of lampoons of writers expected to produce ‘big books’, writers named Jonathan and an assortment of other self-referential gags, but also the fact that its eponymous heroine, Purity Tyler, is nicknamed Pip.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16 Tel: 08430 600033. Sarah Churchwell teaches at the University of East Anglia and is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby.
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