Jonathan Franzen: Too Cool for Oprah (2001)

Pop quiz time. You’re an author whose first two books tanked. Your third, however, scores great buzz. Then Oprah Winfrey calls. She wants your book for her book club. Your publisher orders up another 680,000 copies on top of the 200,000 your book’s already sold. While books by postmodern rivals Don Delillo’s “Underworld” and Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” grace remainder tables across the country, a quick check at the calculator says that Oprah calling your book “the best 568 pages I’ve read in years” means $2 million, plus a wider readership.

Do you:

A) Pop the champagne and congratulate yourself on writing a critical and popular success;

B) Fear that your book would be considered similar to “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” Oprah picks
such as Wally Lamb’s “She’s Come Undone” and politely decline?

C) Worry in public that Oprah damages your reputation as a writer “in the high art literary tradition,” dashes your hopes “of actually reaching a male audience” and resent “that corporate branding right there next to my name and title.” Then, after Oprah cancels your book, muse that “to find myself identified with an arrogant New York literary contingent makes me feel very misunderstood.”

When Oprah picked Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” as the go-to book for millions of her fans in October 2001, the self-styled critic of American culture found himself eagerly embraced by the very people he was criticizing. He was in danger of becoming . . . popular. Even worse, mainstream. To writers like Franzen, who cut their teeth in MFA programs, writers conferences and the New York literary scene, “best-selling literary author” is a contradiction in terms, like honest publisher or unbiased reviewer. Something had to be done.

So Franzen went public, explaining the subtle nuances in his conflict over becoming an Oprah-approved author, and the result was about as successful as a chocolate coffeepot.

His friends tried to defend him. Chris Lehmann of the Washington Post Book World attacked Oprah for withdrawing the invitation and suggested that her audience would love to hear an extended digression into Franzen’s hurt feelings rather than the book they all bought and (presumably) read. Eliza Truitt defended “fancy-pants literary authors” as exempt from “the current universal requirements to profess a deep love for crappy culture,” a love no doubt shared by Oprah’s fans. Poor Johnny Franzen, they wailed in chorus, didn’t know how the media works, even if he did write three books and numerous articles and sat for hundreds of interviews.

Amid the barrage of criticism, Franzen soldiered on, and each new interview offered a fresh opportunity to jam his foot deeper into his mouth:

To Oprah fans, praise for the TV host, sort of: “To find myself . . . giving offense to someone who’s a hero — not a hero of mine, per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way.”

To male readers, recognition of their intelligence, discernment and taste: “So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry . . . I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I’ve heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say ‘If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.’”

To logic fans, an exercise in figuring just what the hell he meant by this explanation: “You can be married to someone and be out with your buddies and talk about the person you love in ways you really wouldn’t want to be heard by the person you love.”

So, drawing on his profound understanding of American disillusionment and alienation, aided by the rancid popular culture he satirized in “The Corrections,” Franzen hit on a brilliant idea that no doubt would restore his reputation as a writer “in the high art literary tradition.”

He appeared on “The Simpsons.”

Thanks to Dennis Loy Johnson at mobylives.com, from whom I stole the essay’s title.

Born today: Horace Walpole, novelist, London, 1717; F. Scott Fitzgerald, novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, St. Paul, Minn., 1896; Jim Henson, puppeteer, humorist, Greensville, Miss., 1936.

Died: Dr. Seuss (ps. Theodor Seuss Geisel), children’s author, illustrator, La Jolla, Calif., 1991; Françoise Sagan (ps. Françoise Quoirez), novelist, playwright, Honfleur, France, 2004.

Also from the Reader’s Almanac:

• ‘Elizabeth is leaving me for Ted Turner (2007)

• Pottermania reaches its peak (2007)
• A valentine from Olivia Goldsmith (1996)
• Joe Klein fesses up (1996)
• The mortification of Martin Amis (1995)

Bonus Material: There’s two more commentaries on the Franzen-Oprah battle that I wanted to pass along.

First, The Onion’s take:

Second, this:

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