PURITY

Franzen’s novel is an unalloyed listening experience. Clocking in at 25 hours, the audiobook allows plenty of time to love or hate Franzen’s tale of pairs and polarities, dyads and dualities. The characters are contradictions and extremes, with lives that careen between the banal and the bizarre. In short, the book is a dream for any narrator who is itching to demonstrate his or her acting range, as Jenna Lamia, Dylan Baker, and Robert Petkoff handily do. Their performances are uniformly engaging and engrossing; together, they make the listening time fly by. Anyone weighing the potential return on investment of reading all 587 pages can safely turn the heavy lifting over to them. K.W. Winner of AudioFIle Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2015]