Book Review: Making it big

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...