There were dysfunctional families at the center of “The Corrections” and “Freedom,” too, but those books willfully opened outward to try to capture the tenor of the times — the money-grubbing ’90s and the angry, polarized George W. Bush years. The stories of the characters in “Purity” zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen’s determination to build on the steps he took in “Freedom” to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence — and to allow himself to feel something like sympathy for them.

Image Jonathan Franzen Credit... Shelby Graham

Certainly, there are plenty of aggrieved characters in “Purity” sporting noxious traits familiar from people in earlier Franzen books — industrial-strength anger and high-octane envy, coupled with lots of passive-aggressive narcissism and self-pity. And the opening pages of the novel, which introduce Purity (or Pip, as she calls herself), depressingly suggest that we’re going to be stuck with a “snarky little twerp” of a heroine, who brings out her creator’s worst proclivities toward condescension. It’s unclear whether Mr. Franzen means Pip to initially be so obnoxious — perhaps as a way of subverting tropes of the bildungsroman, or as an act of self-satire. Or whether he’s simply finding his sea legs, relying on old default settings of sarcasm before finding a new and compelling groove.

Happily for the reader, the book quickly picks up speed and nuance, and Pip and the novel’s other major characters soon emerge as knotty, complicated people who compel our attention. Pip, who feels suffocated by her needy, reclusive mother and who’s reeling from a humiliating sexual encounter, sets off, like Telemachus, in search of her mysterious and absent father. Andreas Wolf, an East German provocateur and seducer of young women, who is running from the authorities (for decidedly ignoble reasons), transforms himself into the head of a WikiLeaks-type organization, winning worldwide notoriety and fame. Tom Aberant, who met Andreas years ago in Germany and knows his worst secrets, uses money from his estranged wife’s wealthy father to start an investigative news service. And Leila Helou, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in hot pursuit of a big scoop, finds herself torn between two men — her true love, Tom, and her disabled husband, Charles, the aforementioned writer intent on writing the big book; Leila will take Pip under her wing as a protégée and kind of surrogate daughter.

Mr. Franzen adroitly dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain. After its somewhat stilted start, the novel kicks into gear, with Mr. Franzen writing with gathering assurance and verve. Despite Pip’s name and the mystery surrounding her paternity, “Purity” uses Dickens and “Great Expectations” as a touchstone only in so much as it invokes an array of classics. The emotionally tactile account of Tom’s miserable marriage and divorce from a tempestuous and self-absorbed woman named Anabel recalls Bellow’s “Herzog,” while the caustic descriptions of Andreas’s existential dance with sex and death can feel like Dostoyevsky poured through a comic American filter.

Such passages never feel derivative or hokily postmodern because any influences or models that Mr. Franzen has gobbled down are quickly assimilated and absorbed into his own elastic voice. In “Purity,” he demonstrates his ease at conjuring whole worlds with a couple taps on the keyboard — be it the Bolivian jungle where Andreas is hiding out, populated with “Dr. Seuss birds, huge guans that clambered in fruit trees;” or San Francisco, where fog spills from the hills like “a thing you saw coming,” a “season on the move.”