There's a writer named Charles in Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Purity, who at one point muses that the path to success in modern American letters is determined by "bigness ... thickness, length". Purity by Jonathan Franzen, 4th Estate, R345Franzen, the media's appointed Great American Novelist, has certainly, since the publication of The Corrections in 2001, established his literary reputation through big, epic, ambitious, caustically satirical novels concerned with the malaise and anxieties at the heart of 21st-century white American middle-class life. In his fifth novel he continues this trend but with less of the polemical digressions he made in The Corrections and Freedom and a focus more on story than style.The book centres on three characters whose stories jump through time and across continents and are linked by a dark secret .There's the initially annoying, obnoxious but gradually more likeable 23-year-old Pip (the Great Expectations reference becomes increasingly obvious), real name Purity, who lives in a squat in San Francisco and was raised by her neurotic mother off-the-grid in northern California. Her mother is so paranoid that she refuses to tell her daughter her real name and will not reveal anything about Purity's father.An encounter with a German visitor to the squat leads Pip on a journey to Bolivia to work for a mysterious Julian Assange-like character named Andreas Wolf, who runs an internet activist organisation called the Sunshine Project. Wolf's story takes us to his childhood as the son of an English teacher and her high-placed Communist Party husband in East Germany.Handsome and privileged Wolfgrows to hate everything about his parents and the regime and realises sexual fantasies with young girls, while trying to overcome the dark and complex relationship he has with his mother. One of these women will lead him to do something that will change his life forever and start a compelling chain reaction that brings all the characters together.Wolf's secret is shared by Tom Aberant, who runs an investigative journalism website in Denver where he has a dysfunctional relationship with Leila, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist married to Charles, the writer struggling to write that big novel.Along the way to the resolution of the mystery of who Purity's father is, Franzen reflects on everything from the "plague of literary Jonathans" on the pages of the New York Times Book Review to the totalitarianism of the internet and the ways in which it pulls people apart rather than bringing them together, and the fragile relationships between mothers, daughters, sons and lovers in modern America.Franzen is clearly having fun here and between his sharp sense of humour and the undeniable forward-driving grip of the plot the book makes for entertaining reading.But previous criticisms of his handling of female characters still hold here, with most of the women reduced to stereotypes (except for Leila, the journalist who unfortunately disappears after starring in one of the book's seven sections) - crazy, childless, frigid, confused or promiscuous.Ultimately, like its title character, the novel's strengths outnumber its flaws and once it kicks into gear it's provocative and engaging and offers more than enough evidence that Franzen's reputation rests on more than just the size of his books...