![]() The second may be dubbed l’affaire Oprah-Franzen’s disinvitation by that redoubtable figure on a charge of aggravated elitism, in the course of which he came across as both a snob to the masses and a philistine to the literati. ![]() The first was his 1996 Harper’s essay that renounced the novel of cultural critique in favor of “writ fiction for the fun and entertainment of it,” yet contrived to do so in a way that left him looking like exactly the kind of ideologue he didn’t want to be mistaken for. Of the two things for which Franzen is most famous (other, of course, than The Corrections, his 2001 National Book Award–winning best seller), both were public controversies that erupted from this very self-division. “It turns out,” he once wrote, “that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.” One was the Status model: high art, genius, Flaubert the other was the Contract model: accessibility, pleasure, the community of readers. Jonathan Franzen is, by his own account, a divided soul. ![]()
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