Is Purity author Jonathan Franzen the new Dickens?

But then Franzen has always been determined to write novels that can reach mainstream audiences, even indeed for the novel to be once more “the preeminent medium of social instruction”, as it was in the time of Dickens, as he put it in his famous 1996 Harper’s essay, Perchance to Dream, revised as Why Bother? in his essay collection How to Be Alone.

Born in Illinois in 1959, the youngest of three children of “pragmatic” parents (his father an engineer, his mother a housewife), the young Jonathan Franzen was always an obsessive reader, and began writing plays at high school. But it was to study physics that he went to Swarthmore College and he says he had no concept of literature until he was 21.

However, he managed to change his major to German and escaped to Munich for a year in 1979-80, returning soon after to the Freie Universität Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship. As well as the great 19th-century English, French and Russian classics, he read many German writers such as Rilke and Kafka, who have continued to inspire a different seriousness in him. He re-visits Germany extensively in Purity.

Franzen was married for 14 years to a fellow writer, Valerie Cornell, in a relationship that clearly became claustrophobic as they spent more than a decade in Boston and New York while he struggled to establish himself as a novelist. His first book, The Twenty-Seventh City, of 1988, a sci-fi novel about Indians from Bombay taking over a Midwestern city, and his second, Strong Motion of 1992, about a family’s life improbably disrupted by earthquakes in Boston, remain relatively little known.

These “systems novels” were critically well enough received but did not sell. Franzen wrote his angry essay about the lamentable state of fiction reading and writing, Why Bother?, and evidently entered a period of considerable anger and depression after his divorce and the death of his father.

Out of that time came his first great work, The Corrections, going deep into himself, in New York, in a darkened room, sometimes wearing earmuffs and a blindfold. He had realised, he said: “The only way forward was to go backward and engage again with certain very much unresolved moments in my earlier life. And that’s what the project then became: to invent characters enough unlike me to bear the weight of my material without collapsing into characters too much like me.”

He had found his “hot material”. He confronted, as few writers find the courage to do, “the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm”.

As a result, The Corrections, ostensibly about a family Christmas reunion, is a universal masterpiece, and on publication in 2001 was soon recognised as such. In September that year Oprah Winfrey asked him on to her book show and they taped an interview but before it was broadcast Franzen, always part of the awkward squad, announced he was worried her logo would put men off reading it. The transmission was cancelled. “I’d also like to thank Oprah Winfrey for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections,” Franzen observed, accepting the America’s prestigious National Book Award.

He has continued to assert the value of literature and deep reading, while challenging modern mass culture, consumerism and the predominance of social media pretty incisively, or rudely if you prefer. Most people read YA fiction, even if it doesn’t have YA on the spine, he says. Facebook, texting and Instagram are not an engagement with art at all, he claims. “We live in a world of cant, of received opinion, and widely shared ideologies,” he said recently. “Twitter stands for everything I oppose... It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.” He thinks e-books are not permanent enough. He has had a good go at Amazon too, full of “yakkers and tweeters and braggers”.

Yet his horror of social media doesn’t make him a technophobe, he recently maintained. “It’s the notion that somehow this is a transformative, liberating thing that I take issue with, when it seems to me more like a perfection of the free market’s infiltration of every aspect of a human being’s waking life.”

He has even admitted that “reading time is so scarce nowadays, and alternative entertainment is so widely available, that I’m keenly attuned, as a reader, to whether a book’s author seems to be experiencing something new or is just turning the crank”. And as a writer too, for sure.

His follow-up to The Corrections, Freedom, took nine years to appear, in 2010. Its portrait of a troubled marriage, combined with its tragic realism about how our freedoms can lead us to destruction, was hugely admired, widely compared to Tolstoy. Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine, captioned simply “Great American Novelist”. He finally appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, no less.

Now, just five years later, here is Purity, all 563 pages of it, which tackles not only the subject of its title, the dangerous attraction of seeking purity in life and “how it plays out for better or worse, usually for worse”, but the extremely topical subject of the relationship between secrecy and power in the internet age. One of the main characters is a charismatic internet leaker, not so dissimilar to Julian Assange, a former East German who came to prominence after the fall of the Berlin Wall and now leads a righteous international organisation called The Sunlight Project, but who hides a fatal secret of his own. It is his experience of state socialism that has enabled his rise to power and fame in the new age. “If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the internet.”

So has Jonathan Franzen lost his way? Is this a book best ignored in search of the latest tweet or emoji? No. The truth is that the Man Booker judges have made asses of themselves.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen is published by Fourth Estate on September 1, price £20