High Masculine Tones

Magomania has assembled a group of experts from over 300 top Canadian magazines, and they're just waiting to answer your questions. Judging from what they've posted on the site, so far the response has been underwhelming.

The media furor over the Oprah Book Club's selection and eventual excommunication of Jonathan Franzen, from the author's perspective.

Beginning the next night, in Chicago, I'll encounter two kinds of readers in signing lines and in interviews. One kind will say to me, essentially, "I like your book and I think it's wonderful that Oprah picked it," the other kind will say, "I like your book and I'm so sorry that Oprah picked it." And, because I'm a person who instantly acquires a Texas accent in Texas, I'll respond in kind to each kind of reader. When I talk to admirers of Winfrey, I'll experience a glow of gratitude and good will and agree that it's wonderful to see television expanding the audience for books. When I talk to detractors of Winfrey, I'll experience the bodily discomfort I felt when we were turning my father's oak tree into schmalz, and I'll complain about the Book Club logo. I'll get in trouble for this. I'll achieve unexpected sympathy for Dan Quayle when, in a moment of exhaustion in Oregon, I conflate "high modern" and "art fiction" and use the term "high art" to describe the importance of Proust and Kafka and Faulkner to my writing. I'll get in trouble for this, too. Winfrey will disinvite me from her show because I seem "conflicted." I'll be reviled from coast to coast by outraged populists. I'll be called a "motherfucker" by an anonymous source in New York, a "pompous prick" in Newsweek, an "ego-blinded snob" in the Boston Globe, and a "spoiled, whiny little brat" in the Chicago Tribune. I'll consider the possibility, and to some extent believe, that I am all of these things. I'll repent and explain and qualify, to little avail. My rash will fade as mysteriously as it blossomed; my sense of dividedness will only deepen.

::Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker: 'Meet me in St. Louis'

A New York Review of Books assessment of Joan Didion's collection of political pieces...

An instinctive populist in her politics — she voted for Barry Goldwater and credits Jesse Jackson and her sometime house guest Jerry Brown with having run the only campaigns relevant to real issues or real people in 1992—Didion visits Amer-ican politics with an anthropologist's curiosity and the soul and ear of a writer who is sure to hear every false note in a serenade of false notes, which is what a campaign made up largely of sound bites and attack ads, incoherent half-thoughts and symbolic gestures, almost invariably becomes. What is not altogether to be expected is the feeling —passion is not too strong a word— with which she presses her argument that our politics are simply no longer our own, that they serve the interests of a "permanent professional political class" made up of politicians, their operatives, and talking-head journalists, who together concoct for our national campaigns "a public narrative based at no point on observable reality."

A collection of dispatches and essays written over twelve years for this journal (whose coeditor, it ought to be disclosed, gets top billing in the dedication), the volume has anything but an occasional or random feel. Standing on its own, well apart from all the self-justifying insider accounts of recent American politics, and distinctive in Didion's very considerable body of work for its sustained argument, Political Fictions is the freshest application of an acute literary intelligence to the political scene since Norman Mailer gave up going to conventions and demonstrations nearly three decades ago. It should not be classified as an entertainment—though it regularly entertains—or as a tour de force. Although it is leavened and sustained by occasional reportage from the campaign trail, what you have here is strong-minded polemic.

Joseph Lelyfeld, New York Review of Books: 'Another Country'