Will Oprah Give Franzen the Book Club Nod? Again.

The literati and the blogosphere are speculating all over the place: will Jonathan Franzen’s much-ballyhooed new novel, Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), be the next Oprah Book Club pick?

I’m going to play crystal-ball-reading-person here and say: no. This will not happen. And why? Because, should Oprah pick the book and Franzen accept, we will all know that hell has frozen over. As many of us remember, and as Quill & Quire succinctly points out, “The topic is particularly surprising since, in 2001, Franzen refused Oprah’s seal of approval for The Corrections, cancelling the induction mid-deal with a series of controversial comments.”

Quill & Quire does a great job of rounding up the various dissenting voices here. Meanwhile, I’m reading Freedom myself right now. Not a newsflash, but: while the book is very good, it seems to me to be neither masterwork nor sexist drivel. It’s good, sure. But, still: it’s just a book. Worth reading? Absolutely. Worth all the Franzenfreude? C’mon. What do you think?

We previously talked about Freedom here and here and, in the long ago, reviewed The Corrections here.