“It’s surely the promise of finding something sublimely apart that drives Purity’s characters into entanglements that, looked at objectively, ought to make them run screaming. Indeed Franzen’s willingness to dramatize how his characters consciously let themselves be drawn in and taken advantage of is a testament to his robust understanding of our need to self-transcend — by subjugating or being subjugated by another self — of how it leads the most intelligent and rational among us into some strange arrangements of the heart and mind.”