Why Did Oprah Pick Freedom?

After several weeks of speculation, the Associated Press has jumped the gun on Oprah Winfrey and announced that her next Book Club selection, which she’s planning to unveil on tomorrow’s show, is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. (I didn’t think it would be at first, in part because Macmillan went to unprecedented lengths to obscure the selection, but I’ve heard from folks who confirm the AP’s reporting.) So immediately folks on the Internet start going, “Why? Oprah and Franzen hate each other!”

(In that vein, I was amused at the Franzen reading at the Decatur Book Festival two weeks ago, when the crowd tittered nervously when an audience member mentioned Oprah in his question to the author. What, did they think he was going to snap, jump off the stage, and rip the guy’s head off?)

Well, look, it’s been nearly a decade; people grow up and they stop wasting time and energy on the stupid things that bugged them nine years ago. It’s the final season of Oprah, and frankly I suspect she’s tying up some karmic loose ends in an effort to create a more uniformly positive universe for herself. But the most important thing is: Freedom is an excellent novel, not perfect by any means but definitely worth recommending to millions. And given that Franzen’s ambivalence towards all the non-literary aspects of trying to be a literary author in a commercial marketplace hasn’t changed, it should make for an interesting hour of television.

16 September 2010 | theory |