Jonathan Franzen - Purity

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn’t know it was the apex. In the bright light of his prospects, his marriage of fifteen years was seeming lackluster and unbecoming to him, a contract entered into when Blenheim stock was undervalued. Leila had come along at just the right time to put an end to it. While she was at it, she permanently turned his two daughters against him. She understood how she must have looked to them, and to his wife, and she was sorry about it — she hated being hated — but she didn’t feel especially guilty. It simply wasn’t her fault that Charles was happier with her. Not to choose his happiness and her own happiness over his family’s would have required very strict principles. At the crucial moment, when she’d looked into herself for a clear understanding of right and wrong, she’d instead found the mess her father had bequeathed her.

She was wild about Charles, for a while. Among all his female students, he’d chosen her . His older man’s bulk made her own slightness agreeable to her; made her feel amazingly sexy. He rode a Harley-Davidson to class, he wore his corn-silk hair down to the shoulders of his leather jacket, he referred to literary giants by their first names. To spare him from institutional embarrassment, she quit the writing program. A week after his divorce went through, she rode on the back of his Harley to New Mexico and married him in Taos. She went to conferences with him and performed what she was slow to realize was her function at them: to be younger and fresh and somewhat exotic, to excite the envy of male writers who hadn’t traded in their wives yet or hadn’t done so recently. She’d published enough of her scratchings, in small journals where a word from Charles carried weight, to introduce herself as a fiction writer.

When Charles’s several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book , the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises . But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. A day of frustration was mourned with three large bourbons. A day of conceptual breakthrough and euphoria was celebrated with four large bourbons. To dilate his mind to the requisite bigness, Charles needed to spend weeks on end doing nothing. Although the university asked very little of him, it asked for more than nothing, and the tiniest unperformed tasks became torments to him. Leila took over every task she could and many that she shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t, for example, teach his workshops. For hours, their three-story Craftsman echoed with his groans at the prospect of teaching. The groans came from every floor of it and were at once heartfelt and intended as humor.

It was Charles’s saving grace, and the heart of Leila’s weakness for him, to be funny. On a rare good day, he might produce a long paragraph — disconnected, like all its fellows, from any other paragraph — that made her hoot with laughter. Much more often, there was no paragraph. Instead, during the small scrap of time when she was free to toil on her scratchings, at the child-size desk of his older daughter, in what had been the daughter’s bedroom, and to self-hatingly contrast her flat reportorial style with the “twinned muscularity and febrility” ( New York Times Book Review , front page) of her husband’s paragraphs, even though he’d failed to string together two of them since before she’d married him, she heard the door of his book-lined third-floor study open, followed by the Trudge. He retarded this Trudge, knowing she could hear it, to make the very sound of it funny. Finally he stopped outside her closed door and — as if it could be imagined that she hadn’t heard the Trudge approaching — hesitated for some minute or minutes before knocking. Even after he’d opened the door, he didn’t enter the room immediately but stood and slowly turned his gaze on every corner of it, as if wondering whether he might write bigger in a child’s bedroom, or as if to refamiliarize himself with the strange little world of being Leila. Then suddenly — his timing always comic — he looked at her and said, “You busy?” She never said she was. He entered the room and fell onto the dust-ruffled single bed and groaned cartoonishly. He was good about apologizing for disturbing her, but she detected, in his apologies, an undercurrent of resentment at her ability to perform household tasks while managing, in her flat reportorial way, to string a few paragraphs together. Sometimes they discussed the etiology of his blockage, his obstacle du jour, but only as a prelude to what he’d come downstairs for, which was to fuck her on the dust-ruffled bed, or on the Douglas-fir flooring, or on the child-size desk. She liked doing it with him. Liked it a lot.

After a year of big book ignition failure, she’d had enough of fiction writing. As a feminist, she couldn’t imagine merely being Charles’s wife, so she went to work at the Denver Post and quickly thrived there, doing journalism for herself now, not for her father. Without her in the house, pages of the big book began to coalesce, albeit slowly and at the cost of stepped-up bourbon intake. After she won a prize for her reporting (Colorado State Fair mismanagement), she dared to excuse herself from the dinners that Charles was obliged to host for visiting writers. Oh, the drinking at those ghastly dinners, the inevitable slighting of Charles, the addition of yet another name to his hate list. Practically the only living American writers Charles didn’t hate now were his students and former students, and if any of the latter had some success it was only a matter of time before they slighted him, betrayed him, and he added them to his list.

Given his sinking confidence and rising self-pity levels, she might have worried that he’d do to her, with some fresh female student, what he’d done to his first wife. But he remained almost maniacally arousable by her. It was as if he were a big cat and she, with her slightness, her littleness, the mouse on which he compulsively pounced. Maybe it was a novelist thing or maybe just Charles, but he couldn’t leave her alone. Even when they weren’t having sex, he was forever poking and probing her, getting his fingers in her spirit, leaving nothing unsaid.

As if in self-defense, she reached the point of wanting him to make her pregnant. She had friends at the Post with babies, toddlers, six-year-olds. She’d held them in her arms and inwardly melted at the trust and innocence with which they put their hands on her face, their faces on her breast, their feet between her legs. Nothing, she came to think, was sweeter than a child, nothing more precious and worth having. But when — on a night carefully selected for having followed a day of thousand-word progress on his book — she took a deep breath and raised the subject of children with Charles, he became especially dramatic. He turned his head with comical slowness and gave her his glowering Look. The Look was supposed to be funny but it also scared her. The Look meant Think about what you just said . Or You must be joking . Or, more sinisterly, Do you realize you’re speaking to a major American novelist? The frequency with which she’d received the Look of late was making her wonder what she was to him. She’d thought he was attracted to her talent and toughness and maturity, but she worried that it was principally her slightness.