A Reluctant Member of the Club

Why is everybody so upset with Jonathan Franzen? All he did was to utter publicly what countless other writers have long thought: that the Oprah-ization of American literature may have its problems after all.

Six weeks ago, after his third novel, “The Corrections,” was picked for Oprah’s Book Club, Franzen expressed ambivalence at the selection, especially the placement of Winfrey’s logo on the dust jacket, which, he has said in interviews, made him feel “like there’s my book, and then there’s her book, and they’re not necessarily the same.” It was that logo of corporate ownership that was gnawing at him, he said. His comments prompted Winfrey to take the unprecedented step of uninviting Franzen from appearing on her show, although “The Corrections” remains a book club choice.

Meanwhile, he has become a favorite target of the very literary press that, just a month ago, couldn’t bend over far enough to accommodate him. He has been vilified as ungrateful, a whiner, someone without the grace, or the intelligence, to embrace his status as a major media star.

All this makes for a compelling story, but unfortunately, it’s the wrong one. The Oprah-Franzen flap is not entirely about what Publishers Weekly columnist Steven Zeitchik calls “juicy questions of literary celebrity, media icons, hi-lo art and spin control”; if these topics are in play, it’s because a scandal-hungry media have put them there.

“Somehow,” Franzen says by phone from his home in Manhattan, “the media have gotten the idea that I don’t like Oprah and her book club. But through it all, I have never felt toward Oprah anything but cordial and grateful, so it is particularly painful to see this cast as me versus Oprah. That is totally not the point.”

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Franzen’s regret may sound disingenuous, but, in fact, he’s on target. What we’re looking at, after all, is a twofold issue, the first having to do with American literary culture’s propensity to eat its children, the other involving his own uncertainty about where he stands. This is not, in other words, a story about hubris--or, as he puts it, “arrogant Franzen and popular Winfrey”--but, rather, one of visibility, the story of what happens when a writer’s work grows too large for it to be controlled.

Control, of course, is one of the engines the American literary community runs on, especially at a time like this, when the mainstream seems to have passed it by. Like any subculture unsure of its importance, it operates by hierarchy, assigning value to certain books and authors, seeking to set itself apart.

In the last few weeks, Franzen says, he’s been approached by people who consider him a hero for what they see as snubbing Winfrey, which “makes me uncomfortable; I want to tell them, ‘I’m not who you think I am.”’ On the other hand, he has a similar reaction to readers who attack him, who consider his response the height of insolence. In that sense, it’s not only Franzen who’s ambivalent about Winfrey, but the entire literary universe, which wants to embrace her visibility, her market potential, while seeking distance from the pandering this implies.

“There’s a fundamental anti-intellectualism in American culture,” notes Janet Fitch, whose first novel, “White Oleander,” was an Oprah book in 1999. “But side by side with that is a distinct strain of intellectual elitism, what you might call the ragged elite.” As a result, Fitch suggests, literary culture often suffers from a garret mentality, the idea that publicity is incompatible with art. “If you remove the garret, the suffering,” she says, “identity crumbles. If you’re not keyed to success, you can be ambivalent about acceptance outside your circle.”

Fitch’s comment is a telling one, for it captures the paradox of Franzen’s situation to a T. Anticipated as the literary event of the year, “The Corrections” has exploded like a pipe bomb in the messy middle ground where literature and commerce collide. Even now, it continues to occupy such a territory; amid the furor over Winfrey, the book was nominated for a National Book Award, and in spite of everything--or perhaps because of it--it still sits atop national bestseller lists.

Faced with that, what writer wouldn’t be confused, especially one like Franzen, who, just five years ago, published a long essay in Harper’s lamenting the state of the American novel, whose pleasures he regards as discrete and singular, antithetical to consumer culture and its desires? “Even now,” he says, “I can’t comprehend the success of the book in any way but one reader at a time; when strangers come up and say they like it, that I get, but the media stuff simply doesn’t signify.”

This, Franzen admits, is what got him into trouble in the first place, but it’s hardly surprising, since if he has a philosophy of literature, it revolves around the author as autonomous observer, someone for whom, as Don DeLillo once wrote (in a letter Franzen quotes, approvingly, in his Harper’s piece), “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

In light of that, what’s most distressing about the Winfrey controversy is the way it overshadows the achievement of “The Corrections,” which has to do with how it blurs, not highlights, the distinctions between high and mass culture, rendering them, in essence, obsolete. This, Franzen argues, was always part of the point; “If I cared about street credibility,” he says, “I wouldn’t have produced a book that Oprah loved. I was writing the book I wanted to write.” The irony is that, in looking for a way to create literature that is accessible, Franzen fell down the media rabbit hole, derided as elitist for insisting on his independence, when any thinking person knows the two are not the same.

“I used to distrust creative-writing departments,” Franzen wrote in the Harper’s essay, “for what seemed to me their artificial safety, just as I distrusted book clubs for treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing. I distrust both a little less now.”

This may explain why, as one book review editor wonders, he didn’t simply turn Winfrey down. Asked if he regrets not having done so, Franzen takes a moment, as if deciding what he wants to say. “No,” he declares at last. “I’m not sorry. I just wish this could have gone more smoothly. Because when you get right down to it, Oprah and I are on the same side.”