Pure class from Franzen as he hits the target again

Purity Tyler, the young woman at the centre of Jonathan Franzen’s masterly fifth novel, is looking for her father. Purity (she calls herself Pip) was raised by her mother in a cabin in the San Lorenzo Valley in Northern California, but her true origins are a mystery: her mother, a hypochondriac hippie devoted to a great spiritual “endeavour”, will only say that she changed her name and ran away just before Pip was ...