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 |

Does the Internet Make Historians Obsolete?

A friend passed along a link to an interesting essay from last weekend’s New York Times Book Review, in which David Frum ostensibly reviews Right Star Rising, a book about American politics in the 1970s, but ultimately has a broader philosophical argument about historiography:

“The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is not tendentious. Once upon a time, such a book might have been useful to somebody. But the question it raises—and it’s not a question about this book alone—is: What’s the point of this kind of history in the age of the Internet?”

“If I am to tell the story of the recent past, I must tell more than is instantly accessible to any moderately motivated citizen,” Frum asserts a bit later, before summarily dismissing Right Star Rising as “a diligent recapitulation of well-known events, perfectly competent and more or less unnecessary.” Now, I don’t know if he’s right about this book or not; I haven’t read it, and with everything that’s already stacked up around my desk, it doesn’t seem likely I’ll have time to read it any time soon. What I’m interested in here is Frum’s underlying argument, which privileges an interpretive model of history writing over a “purely” descriptive one. (I put “purely” in quotes there because the stance of objective description is itself an act of interpretation, though one that strives to remain invisible.) The problem with Right Star Rising, Frum seems to be suggesting, is that it doesn’t have a moral to it.

I’m not entirely convinced. First, I’d argue that the point of history is not necessarily to understand the past in terms that are relevant to us, but to understand the past on its own terms (although, now that I set those words down on the screen, I see Frum’s position might not contradict that); second, I’d argue that there is some value in sifting through the historical evidence and attempting to create a coherent descriptive narrative (which, as I said above, is in fact an interpretive narrative); third, I’d argue that historians don’t necessarily need to hit their readers over the head with the moral of the story or the “and what have we learned from all this?” chapter—subtlety can be an entertaining and pleasant thing. But I think it’s very interesting that Frum is raising the question, and I don’t even particularly care that he used a book review as a springboard for a philosophical issue which actually has little to do with the book under consideration—if the NYTBR wanted to be an middlebrow op-ed section masquerading as a book review, Frum’s essay would be a good way to go about doing it.

8 September 2010 | theory |