Winfrey Rescinds Offer to
Author for Guest Appearance
By
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Many authors had reason to
feel jealous when Jonathan Franzen's best-selling and critically acclaimed
novel ''The Corrections'' was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club,
guaranteeing even more sales.
But this week Mr. Franzen
earned an even rarer distinction as the first author to be formally uninvited
to appear on her television show.
Ms. Winfrey's decision
stemmed from occasional public comments by Mr. Franzen that she felt disparaged
her literary selections as middlebrow or unsophisticated. Her reaction quickly
became the talk of the literary world because of Mr. Franzen's status as its
author-of-the-moment. Yesterday, he apologized, suggesting some of his comments
were taken out of context.
Most authors are careful
not to offend Ms. Winfrey. Her book club sends legions of her viewers into
bookstores. She has often made best-sellers of previously low-selling but
critically acclaimed authors, and her selections have included highly regarded
writers like Toni Morrison, Wally Lamb and Isabel Allende.
But some of Mr. Franzen's
comments suggested an unusual ambivalence about his selection. ''The first
weekend after I heard I considered turning it down,'' Mr. Franzen told The
Portland Oregonian, for example. ''I see this as my book, my creation, and I
didn't want that logo of corporate ownership on it.''
After a book is selected by
Ms. Winfrey's book club, publishers often reprint copies with a logo
designating its selection on its cover, which Mr. Franzen described as an endorsement
for her as well as for him.
In an interview on National
Public Radio, he said his selection, ''heightens this sense of split that I
feel.''
''I feel like I'm solidly
in the high-art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this
maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being
misunderstood,'' he said.
Mr. Franzen suggested that
men might be put off by Ms. Winfrey's selection, perhaps because her choices
were often viewed as appealing mainly to women. Mr. Franzen described a segment
of Ms. Winfrey's show as ''the sort of bogus thing where they follow you around
with a camera.''
In an interview with
Powell's bookstore in Portland, Ore., that was reprinted on its Web site, Mr.
Franzen said, ''She's picked some good books, but she's picked enough
schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think
she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight.''
After learning of his
statements, Ms. Winfrey reconsidered her selection. In a statement to
Publishers Weekly that appeared in an e-mail newsletter Monday night, Ms.
Winfrey said: ''Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because
he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club
selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause
anyone conflict.''
Still, she has not revoked
her selection and many of her readers have bought his book in anticipation of
his appearance this fall.
Yesterday, Mr. Franzen said
in a telephone interview that he regretted his comments, and that some had
appeared out of context. ''I said things that ended up hurting Oprah Winfrey's
feelings and far too late it was pointed out to me that this was happening,''
he said. ''I feel bad for a number of reasons, because I really don't like to
hurt people, and I feel bad because the person being hurt is actually a really
good person for American writing and reading.''
Mr. Franzen said he did
have misgivings about the seal from Ms. Winfrey's book club appearing on the
cover of the book. ''I stayed up worrying about it a couple of nights, because
of this rather stringent tradition in American publishing that there is no
advertising on the cover of hardcover fiction.''
In the end, his publisher,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a unit of Holtzbrinck, kept editions without the
seal in print.
But Mr. Franzen attributed
the tone of the comments and articles partly to his inexperience and naïveté in
dealing with the media. Often, he said, he found himself responding to
questions about how he felt as an unusual selection for Ms. Winfrey, but he
never brought it up.
He added that he had no
interest in debates about the boundaries between literary and popular books.
Mr. Franzen is closely associated with highbrow fiction because of a 1996 essay
he published in Harper's magazine about the challenge of writing sophisticated,
socially engaged novels, in which he seemed sometimes to dismiss the
possibility of a popular audience for serious fiction.
''Oprah Winfrey is bent on
demonstrating that estimates of the size of the audience for good books is too
small, and that is why it is so unfortunate that this is being cast as arrogant
Franzen and popular Winfrey -- I like her for liking my book,'' he said.
Others in the industry found
the episode riveting. ''One would have to be a better person than me not to be
amused by this whole drama,'' said Bill Thomas, editor in chief of Doubleday.
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