Author Jonathan Franzen, who took a decade to produce his last novel, “Freedom,” after winning the 2001 National Book Award for “The Corrections” — also 10 years in the making — is turning out his next one in half the time. “Purity,” a multigenerational tale that hops from modern America to South America to Berlin Wall-era East Germany, will be published by Farrar, Straus and & Giroux in September. Its publisher hints that the novel will represent somewhat of a departure from Franzen’s usual natural realism style, laying down a “mythic undertone” to the story of the young woman of the title, who is engaged in a search for the identity of her father.

— Sue Gilmore, Staff