“Purity”
Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
In Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel Purity, the author introduces the reader to Purity (“Pip”) Tyler, a 23-year old recent college graduate with $130,000 in student loan debt living in a squatter’s house in Oakland, California. Distancing herself from the mother who raised her in the Santa Cruz mountains, trying to find her biological father, and employed in a dead-end job, Pip is all but disillusioned about the world and the impact she will make on it. When offered an internship to work for the Sunlight Project – an organization that prides itself on leaking government secrets – in Bolivia, Pip takes a leap of faith, quits her job, packs up, and moves to South America. Read more 
“The Goldfinch”
Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be. Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?”…this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?” Read more
Paddock Post 