Oh no, Oprah.

See? I knew this would happen. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is the latest Oprah book club pick. Sorry, ma'am, our brief honeymoon is over.

Click here to listen to the most tooth-grindingly, navel-gazingly boring podcast of all time if you need a Franzen refresher.

And don't you feel worse for having heard that interview? Because I do.

Alright alright maybe Freedom is really going to be amazing, but I am a creature of habit, and my habit around Jonathan Franzen is comprised of a strong and abiding dislike of his work. These days, this opinion seems to put me in the minority. There was a frigging piece about him on the Saturday evening news, for lord's sake. A piece involving his visit to a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. A piece that I actually enjoyed listening to, if only because it felt so painfully humbling to think of a public library that hosts Jonathan Fucking Franzen, having only worked for places that bring in, um, this woman who is a patron who also happens to have self-published a chapbook, you know? PERSPECTIVE!

Anyway, this piece drew a really absurd link between Jonathan Franzen and Lady Gaga, and it irked me, as most references to overexposed literary heroes do. I guess I just feel like I'm one of the only book nerds in the world who doesn't get the in-joke, who can't stand Jonathan Franzen. I read The Corrections a looooong time ago, and I read it because he had jive-talked Oprah, because that's the kind of hifalutin' twentysomething I was. I pretty much hated the whole thing, but I told everyone how much I loved it. At the time I was working on a Bookmobile, and my job consisted of sitting in a lawn chair outside the bus and waiting for kids to come and tell me about the books they'd read and then giving them stickers--pretty well the best job I'll ever have and arguably among the top five jobs of all time, anywhere. Between tiny visitors I schlepped that giant Franzen tome onto my lap and got angry about how cold and unemotional it was and what nerve this guy has to write creepy CS Lewis metaphors about antidpressants and I'd work myself into this rage and then pause to talk to some child about how they'd just finished the fourth Harry Potter. It was all a bit jarring. Perhaps this was not the ideal environment in which to read Jonathan Franzen, but the die was cast. I think what I've realized since is that I hate a lack of sympathy in my reading. I crave emotional fullness and vulnerability and I hate dispassionate, post-pomo reflection. There, I said it.

Which isn't to say I won't read Freedom. I probably will, because I still possess the same mix of masochism and high-mindedness I've always possessed. And I might email his publicist and see if he might like to speak at my library, on the condition that he has to help me kick everyone off the public internet stations at the end of the night. I'm a woman with standards, you know.

Now let's all cleanse our palates with a little rainy day ditty from Julie London.



I feel better already.