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Episode: Decoder Ring: Selling Out (Encore)
Author: Slate Podcasts
Duration: 00:53:19
Episode Shownotes
Whatever happened to selling out? The defining concern of Generation X has become a relic from another era. How that happened is best illustrated by one of the idea’s last gasps, when in 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited author Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel
The Corrections. A month later, she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm. The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other, and one of them—the one that was on its way out already—crashed and burned in public, seldom to be seen again. Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include screenwriter Helen Childress; writer and musician Franz Nicolay; New York Times critic Wesley Morris, Oprah producer Alice McGee; Boris Kachka, author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; Bethany Klein, author of Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music; and Laura Miller, Slate’s book critic. This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Benjamin Frisch. It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth. Cleo Levin was our research assistant. Decoder Ring is produced by Evan Chung, Katie Shepherd, and Max Freedman, with help from Sofie Kodner. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring and all other Slate podcasts without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Disclosure: A Bond Account is a self-directed brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Deposits into this account are used to purchase 10 investment-grade and high-yield bonds. As of 9/26/24, the average, annualized yield to worst (YTW) across the Bond Account is greater than 6%. A bond’s yield is a function of its market price, which can fluctuate; therefore, a bond’s YTW is not “locked in” until the bond is purchased, and your yield at time of purchase may be different from the yield shown here. The “locked in” YTW is not guaranteed; you may receive less than the YTW of the bonds in the Bond Account if you sell any of the bonds before maturity or if the issuer defaults on the bond. Public Investing charges a markup on each bond trade. See our Fee Schedule. Bond Accounts are not recommendations of individual bonds or default allocations. The bonds in the Bond Account have not been selected based on your needs or risk profile. See https://public.com/disclosures/bond-account to learn more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Summary
In this episode of Slow Burn, host Josh Levin examines the fading cultural significance of 'selling out,' particularly through the lens of Jonathan Franzen's interaction with Oprah Winfrey in 2001. The episode reflects on how the once-dominant concerns of Generation X regarding commercialization and authenticity have evolved, despite the underlying tensions remaining relevant today. With insights from various contributors, the discussion highlights the complexities surrounding artistic integrity, mainstream success, and the cultural implications of commercial influences on literature.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Decoder Ring: Selling Out (Encore)) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_12
Hi, it's Willa. I knew I wanted to do an episode about the idea of selling out for a couple of years before we actually went ahead and made one. Selling out is this concept that had once loomed very large as a thing you did not want to do.
00:00:14 Speaker_12
And I was interested in exploring how and why that had changed. Because it really felt like it had. For a long time, though, I could not figure out a story that illustrated those changes. It was an idea in search of a narrative, basically.
00:00:30 Speaker_12
And then a colleague suggested I take a closer look at Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey and their book club brouhaha. And there it was, our narrative.
00:00:40 Speaker_12
This episode aired three years ago, but the question of what selling out was and what happened to it, and if we're missing it or something like it, it's just remained extremely current.
00:00:50 Speaker_12
We're still thinking about selling out and what it meant, even we're also less worried about doing it. And I think this episode is really illuminating about why. So we're airing it again today. We hope you enjoy.
00:01:08 Speaker_12
In 1992, Helen Childress, a screenwriter, was watching one of the presidential debates on TV.
00:01:14 Speaker_03
Everyone was talking about soundbites. They were like, this is a campaign reduced to soundbites. We can't vote for anyone based off soundbites.
00:01:21 Speaker_12
Helen was just 22 years old, but she'd been hired to write a screenplay about her generation, Generation X, the famously ironic, skeptical, media-savvy cohort that had come up in the shadow of the baby boomers.
00:01:36 Speaker_12
In her script, the main character, Lelaina, is working on a documentary, constantly filming all her friends with a video camera.
00:01:43 Speaker_03
And so off of that, I had Lelaina call her documentary Reality Bites, as if these are little kind of bites of reality.
00:01:53 Speaker_12
Reality Bites would become the name of the movie Helen was writing. It was released in 1994, directed by Ben Stiller and co-starring Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke.
00:02:04 Speaker_09
He stole a Snickers bar.
00:02:06 Speaker_02
Yeah. Somehow he can rationalize it, like the establishment owes him a Snickers.
00:02:15 Speaker_12
The movie concerns itself with a number of timeless questions. How to grow up? What kind of work to do? Who to love? But it is also very much a time capsule, full of period-specific details and situations,
00:02:29 Speaker_12
Entry-level jobs at the Gap, AIDS tests as a rite of passage, greasy hair, a Lisa Loeb song. And then there's the movie's paramount concern, which is also a deeply dated one. Selling out.
00:02:47 Speaker_03
I don't think the words selling out, I don't think they're in the movie. I think it's something that was kind of, in a way, maybe just baked in. It was just something you didn't want to do. You didn't want to align your interests with a corporation's.
00:03:05 Speaker_03
And you certainly didn't want to commercialize what you liked.
00:03:10 Speaker_12
To sell out is to betray your principles, your art, your community, yourself for some kind of financial or commercial gain. And it's right at the heart of Reality Bites.
00:03:22 Speaker_12
In the movie, Lelaina, played by Ryder, has to choose between Michael, a TV executive played by Stiller, and Troy, an alluring, snicker-stealing slacker played by Hawk.
00:03:33 Speaker_12
Michael seems sweet and supportive until he reveals himself to be a corporate hack. He lets Lelaina's documentary get re-edited into MTV-style schlock. he pushes her to sell out.
00:03:45 Speaker_15
It's not my work, Michael. That's not what I did. That's not what I want. I have nothing! It was probably a little slow, and they cut it up a little. They cut it up! They cut it up! Everything that meant anything to me.
00:03:54 Speaker_15
I mean, I don't even think you realize what you've done. You don't get it. You just don't get it. I do get it.
00:04:00 Speaker_12
Lelaina dumps him and hooks up with Troy instead. In Reality Bites, not selling out is an actionable, tangible, generation-defining principle. And that was true outside of the movie, too. Helen had worked incredibly hard on the film.
00:04:20 Speaker_12
She knew it was a commercial product, and she wanted it to do well. She hoped it would lead to more opportunities in Hollywood. But even so, she was really uncomfortable selling it.
00:04:31 Speaker_03
We all had the impulse to say, like, hey, we're not we're not trying to sell you anything. We just made a movie. We're not we're not that. We didn't mean to, like, charge money for you to see it or anything. This is all just happened to come together.
00:04:45 Speaker_03
And, you know, we're not going to promote it. Like, why would we promote it? That's so embarrassing. Yeah. Yeah. To look like you're selling something is like completely embarrassing.
00:04:55 Speaker_12
Sally Jessie Raphael asked her to go on her show. So did Bill Maher. She said no. She felt uneasy about the attention, about speaking for her generation. But there was one opportunity in particular, one chance to promote the film that really stood out.
00:05:12 Speaker_03
The Oprah Winfrey show in Chicago was doing a was going to do an episode on Generation X. And they asked me to be on it. I turned it down. I said, no, I just I mean, I'm embarrassed telling the story.
00:05:27 Speaker_03
It felt like it would be commercializing generational aspects of the movie, I guess. It's just like she says in the movie, you know, I don't really know if I want to commercialize it.
00:05:39 Speaker_12
In 2021, this choice is hard to fathom. Turning down a chance to go on Oprah because you don't want to commercialize your commercial movie.
00:05:49 Speaker_03
It barely makes sense to Helen. It is something that I look back on and go, what was I thinking? Why didn't they just, you know, like I could have met Oprah.
00:06:00 Speaker_12
But Helen's not the only person who has ever found this to be a tough choice. Twenty years ago, one man famously found it to be a tough choice. And it's his choice and what it tells us about selling out that's going to be the subject of this episode.
00:06:23 Speaker_12
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. In this episode, we're going to be looking at the idea of selling out and how it went from the defining principle of Helen's Generation to whatever it is now.
00:06:36 Speaker_12
And we're going to be doing it by looking at an inflection point in that idea's trajectory. In 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel, The Corrections.
00:06:49 Speaker_12
A month later, amidst a media frenzy, she withdrew the invitation.
00:06:55 Speaker_12
Over the course of this episode, I hope to convince you that the Oprah Franzen book club dustup of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other.
00:07:07 Speaker_12
And one of them, the one that was on its way out already, crashed and burned in public, barely to be seen again. So today on Decoder Ring, with an assist from Oprah and Jonathan Franzen, what happened to selling out?
00:07:47 Speaker_07
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00:08:22 Speaker_13
Okay, this is one of my all time favorite moments I'm having on television right now. You are witnessing it.
00:08:28 Speaker_12
The Oprah Book Club began on September 17, 1996, as a segment on Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show.
00:08:35 Speaker_13
And what we want to do is start a book club here on The Oprah Show. And I want to get the whole country reading again. Those of you who haven't been reading, I think books are important.
00:08:46 Speaker_12
The book club instantly became a cultural and publishing phenomenon. In the first five years of its existence, it featured dozens of authors and sold millions of books.
00:08:57 Speaker_12
And then in September of 2001, Oprah picked the club's 45th book, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. She called Franzen personally to tell him the news.
00:09:08 Speaker_10
It was so unexpected that I was almost not surprised. It was like, oh, hey, Oprah, thank you for calling. Yeah, oh, that's nice.
00:09:14 Speaker_12
And I put down the phone because— That's Franzen, who declined to speak with us, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2001.
00:09:23 Speaker_12
Prior to the publication of The Corrections, Franzen, then 41, had written two underperforming novels and wasn't well-known outside of the literary world. Yet The Corrections had arrived as an attention-grabbing, oxygen-hoovering, big freaking deal.
00:09:38 Speaker_12
It was heralded as a masterpiece, received rave reviews, and even sold enough copies to make the bestseller list. Rare for a literary book.
00:09:47 Speaker_12
With the Oprah selection, it appeared to be running the table, the biggest book in America about to get even bigger. And in fact, after Oprah's announcement, it did get bigger, but not in the way anyone had been expecting.
00:10:01 Speaker_12
And what I want to show you, starting now, is how tangled up everything that happened is with the idea of selling out, which meant something to both of the people involved in this story.
00:10:13 Speaker_12
In the years leading up to the corrections selection, Jonathan Franzen had decided to go mainstream, and Oprah Winfrey had resolved not to sell out. And those choices and their feelings about them had set the two of them on a collision course.
00:10:28 Speaker_12
But before we can get into that collision, I need to jump back in time on all of it, on Oprah, on Franzen, and most especially on the idea of selling out. Okay, so I want to look at the history of the idea of selling out.
00:10:49 Speaker_12
And it's a really big idea, tangled up with a lot of other really big ideas like authenticity, purity, integrity, race, gender, and the entire history of art and commerce in the second half of the 20th century.
00:11:03 Speaker_12
There have been so many fights about selling out over the last 60 years and it has meant so many slightly varying things to so many people. But I'm going to forgo most of these specific set-tos for the big picture. Let's jump in.
00:11:20 Speaker_12
Franz Nikolai is a musician and writer who's been in bands including the Hold Steady.
00:11:24 Speaker_01
The pejorative usage in terms of a prostitution of ideals or a betrayal of principle seems to be specifically American.
00:11:32 Speaker_12
This usage began to become more common in the late 19th century, first during the Gilded Age and then even more so during the Great Depression.
00:11:41 Speaker_12
In both instances, it was primarily used on the left, and it was something you'd accuse a corrupt politician of doing. By the 1940s, the term was also being used by civil rights activists, also on the left.
00:11:54 Speaker_12
But in the context of race, a sellout is not just someone who betrays a principle or an ideal. It's a person who betrays other Black people.
00:12:02 Speaker_08
What classifies a person as being a sellout for Black people is it's your proximity to whiteness and white people.
00:12:09 Speaker_12
Wesley Morris is a critic at large at The New York Times and the co-host of Still Processing.
00:12:13 Speaker_08
Like, how do we trust what kind of black person you are if you are sort of bound up, if your thing is bound up in these white people or in whiteness.
00:12:25 Speaker_12
This sense of selling out is a whole giant subject of its own. It's going to come up a bit, but it's not what I'm going to be focused on. I'm looking at the idea of selling out as an entanglement with commercialism.
00:12:37 Speaker_12
But it is via this racial usage, as an accusation that Black people might level against other Black people, that the idea of selling out makes its way into the arts and the art form it's most associated with. Music.
00:12:52 Speaker_12
What happens is that Black musicians, critics, and audiences in the 1950s and early 60s start debating whether other Black artists are keeping it real. Franz Nicolai again.
00:13:03 Speaker_01
It appears to have been first applied to musicians by Black audiences and fellow musicians criticizing Black gospel and jazz performers who were perceived as tailoring their acts to appeal to white audiences.
00:13:17 Speaker_12
But once this idea was unleashed in the musical realm, it swiftly spread beyond Black artists, most famously at first to Bob Dylan.
00:13:25 Speaker_12
When Dylan strapped on an electric guitar and performed the rock band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, folk music purists in the audience called him a sellout.
00:13:36 Speaker_12
From here, the term is off to the races, boosted by music, the foregrounding of leftist politics, and also money. Selling out is fundamentally an anxiety of wealth.
00:13:49 Speaker_12
It's a concern that arises when there's cash floating around and people comfortable enough to say no to it. You don't turn down a job during the Great Depression.
00:13:59 Speaker_12
As the post-war economy is roaring, dropping out becomes a kind of luxury, but one that also signals integrity, a rebellion against the stultifying, dehumanizing mainstream, against life as a housewife or a man in a gray flannel suit.
00:14:14 Speaker_12
The idea that keeping some distance from the man is a sign of personal integrity is omnipresent through the 60s and 70s. But it gets a burst of energy in the 1980s as the generation that popularized the idea of selling out starts to do it.
00:14:29 Speaker_12
The baby boomers get older. They want families and homes of their own. The effect is that of an entire generation selling out en masse. The counterculture embracing yuppiedom.
00:14:40 Speaker_12
And the young adults and teens observing this transformation, ones who have been raised on the values of the hippie generation, watch as those values get faithlessly abandoned by the people who had created them.
00:14:54 Speaker_12
They construct a whole generational identity in opposition to all of this bullshit. You can see this worldview expressed exactly in Reality Bites.
00:15:05 Speaker_16
And they wonder why those of us in our 20s refuse to work an 80-hour week just so we can afford to buy their BMWs.
00:15:14 Speaker_16
why we aren't interested in the counterculture that they invented, as if we did not see them disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes.
00:15:23 Speaker_12
This perspective gets a particularly potent expression in underground DIY rock scenes that spring up across the country throughout the 1980s.
00:15:32 Speaker_12
These scenes are generally dominated by white men who are rebelling not only against their baby boomer forebearers, but the excesses of commercial rock music and MTV superficiality. In them, selling out becomes particularly contentious.
00:15:48 Speaker_12
Signing to a major label, licensing your music, corporate sponsorships, God forbid doing a commercial, will all give rise to accusations of selling out.
00:16:00 Speaker_12
Heading into the 1990s, grunge bands connected to this independent rock ethos break into the mainstream, just as rap music, which is also concerned about selling out, does too. Selling out anxieties and accusations are everywhere.
00:16:15 Speaker_12
Pearl Jam and MC Hammer are some of the more popular targets. And all of this is playing out against a related, larger backdrop of extreme sensitivity to corporate manipulation.
00:16:27 Speaker_12
You can see that in the success of magazines like The Baffler and Adbusters, and books like Naomi Klein's No Logo, that all attend in their ways to the dangers of being sold.
00:16:38 Speaker_12
This is also when Kurt Cobain appears on the cover of Rolling Stone in a homemade t-shirt reading, Corporate Magazines Still Suck, broadcasting his discomfort with the photo shoot he's participating in.
00:16:51 Speaker_12
And it's at this point, in the mid-1990s, as cultural concerns about selling out are reaching a fever pitch, that our two protagonists make big, important decisions about their own careers, about how much they're going to court mainstream popularity, and how much they're going to stay true to their own ideals.
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00:19:14 Speaker_12
That's Saks.com for the ultimate holiday gift guide and all the shopping inspiration you need. So we're going to look at Oprah first and how her refusal to sell out led directly to the launch of her book club. You heard me.
00:19:30 Speaker_12
To explain how this could be, I got to back up again to the beginning of the Oprah Winfrey show or really to the show that preceded it, A.M. Chicago.
00:19:37 Speaker_14
Welcome you all to A.M. Chicago. It's a hysterical first, a historical first.
00:19:43 Speaker_12
A.M. Chicago was a low rated half hour daily talk show when Oprah took over hosting it in January of 1984. Within a month of her arrival, AM Chicago was the highest rated talk show in the Chicagoland area. And there was an intern working at AM Chicago.
00:19:58 Speaker_12
She'd started the day after Oprah. My name is Alice McGee. Alice was a student at Chicago's Northeastern University. On her commute to the office, she would always read a novel.
00:20:09 Speaker_12
About three or four weeks into the job, she was heading out, holding the book she was going to read in her hands because it didn't fit in her purse. Oprah saw it.
00:20:17 Speaker_12
It was The Color Purple, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker about a young Black woman in 1900s Georgia. And she goes, what are you doing with that book? I said, that's for my L. Wright home.
00:20:27 Speaker_12
Alice didn't know it at the time, but Oprah loved The Color Purple. She would go on to receive an Oscar nomination for her performance in Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of the book.
00:20:37 Speaker_04
And she goes, have you ever read Toni Morrison? Well, I read Solomon. And then she said, did you read Bluest Eye? And I said, no, I haven't read it. How can you say you've read Toni Morrison without reading the Bluest Eye? I was like, oh, God.
00:20:49 Speaker_04
And the very next morning, the temporary desk where I had sat at had the Bluest Eye on it. Oh, my God, I read it that night. And she said, tell me what you think about it.
00:20:57 Speaker_04
And it was, I guess, in some ways, the start of the book club, even though it was 1984.
00:21:02 Speaker_12
Alice kept working for Oprah, eventually becoming a producer on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
00:21:07 Speaker_04
During this, you know, I'd call her in the middle of the night if I had a good book, you know, because I know that's how she was.
00:21:11 Speaker_04
And so we always had that, you know, we had our professional relationship, but our book relationship was even more meaningful.
00:21:17 Speaker_12
As much as they loved books and talking about books, through the 1980s, doing an episode about fiction on The Oprah Winfrey Show just seemed like something they couldn't do.
00:21:28 Speaker_04
At the time, we are still reading, but never would it occur to us to do a book club because it wasn't a topic that people would tune in. You'd be slicing your audience, you'd be quartering them.
00:21:41 Speaker_12
So books seemed like a non-starter. And then in 1994, Oprah decided that The Oprah Winfrey Show needed to change.
00:21:49 Speaker_12
This decision is really well captured in the podcast Making Oprah from WBEZ Chicago that I strongly recommend and that I also relied upon to understand what happened. And what happened is this.
00:22:01 Speaker_12
Until 1994, The Oprah Winfrey Show still had a strong tabloid streak. It covered some serious topics, but it also did plenty of salacious episodes about cheating spouses and shopaholics.
00:22:12 Speaker_12
But that year, the year Oprah turned 40, she decided she just did not want to do trash TV anymore. She used that exact term in an interview. She wanted all of her episodes to have a purpose, an intention, even if it meant giving her competitors
00:22:28 Speaker_12
the dozens of daytime talk shows she'd inspired an advantage. Even if it meant ratings would dip, which in fact they did, falling from 12 to 9 million viewers around this time.
00:22:40 Speaker_12
Much later, in 2007, Oprah gave a graduation speech at Howard University that I think is germane.
00:22:47 Speaker_13
So do not be a slave to any form of selling out. Maintain your integrity.
00:22:54 Speaker_12
In it, she's talking generally about how the students need to be true to themselves and the Black community. But I think she's also referring specifically to this period in the 1990s, when she had to choose between her values and her ratings.
00:23:08 Speaker_12
when, as you're about to hear her say, she chose not to sell out.
00:23:14 Speaker_13
If I could count the number of times I have been asked to compromise and sell out myself for one reason or another, I would be a billionaire 10 times over.
00:23:28 Speaker_13
Many times when we were told that we would lose the advertisers, we would lose the ratings, I said, I'm going to take the high road. They said, you won't be able to survive in this business taking the high road. You won't be able to get the numbers.
00:23:43 Speaker_13
The advertisers will drop out, and I said, let them. Let them. We will chart our own course.
00:23:50 Speaker_12
And one thing Oprah decides to do as she's charting her own course, ratings be damned, is to talk about books. Alice McGee again.
00:24:00 Speaker_04
I went to the executive producer's office to pitch the idea of a book club just as a segment. We just share what Oprah's reading. Just do one segment at the end.
00:24:09 Speaker_04
Um, and then we'll follow up in a month and maybe, you know, we even talked to some people who read it. One month later, I got a phone call at home and it was Alice. I'm reading deep end of the ocean.
00:24:21 Speaker_04
I think this might be good for that book club idea of yours.
00:24:25 Speaker_13
So, this is what we're going to do. Our first book to read, it is a novel written by Jacqueline Mouchard. It is called Deep End of the Ocean. Y'all are going to have to buy it.
00:24:37 Speaker_12
Three weeks after this announcement, The Deep End of the Ocean was number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The second novel Oprah picked was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
00:24:47 Speaker_12
It sold more copies as a result of Oprah's selection than it had when Morrison won the Nobel Prize. After being selected, the books would get a little emblem on them, proclaiming them to be an Oprah book club pick.
00:24:58 Speaker_12
And then a month later, the authors would appear on the show. Writers like Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Wally Lamb, and Maeve Binchy all came on to discuss their work with Oprah and some members of her audience. Here's Morrison in 1996.
00:25:13 Speaker_00
I really thought if I can't do these two things, I will disappear from the face of the earth. And the two were, one, mother my children. Two, write books.
00:25:24 Speaker_12
That is powerful. That is so powerful. Oprah tended to pick novels by or about women. Some were more prestigious than others, some better than others. Alice jokes they had a soft spot for stories about miserable little girls.
00:25:38 Speaker_12
But they were all readable, page turners that could make you cry. In my experience, anyway. I've read a lot of these books in my life. And the Oprah effect reliably turned these books into bestsellers.
00:25:49 Speaker_12
The club is credited with selling over 55 million books. And it is also one of the most memorable, concrete parts of the Oprah Winfrey Show glow-up. It was never exactly a ratings bonanza for the show.
00:26:04 Speaker_12
In fact, audience numbers would dip with each book club episode.
00:26:07 Speaker_04
It was more of an off rating success because you got to know the real Oprah and that was like unexplored territory. I don't have to be ashamed watching daytime TV because there was a stigma attached to it.
00:26:21 Speaker_12
So that's how Oprah became the most influential person in the book industry, by ignoring the ratings and eschewing trash and making the TV show she wanted to make, by refusing to sell out, even if it cost her some of her advertising revenue.
00:26:36 Speaker_12
Meanwhile, Jonathan Franzen was starting to think he'd like to reach a bigger audience. In 1996, the year Oprah launched her book club, Jonathan Franzen was 37.
00:26:52 Speaker_12
He'd published two novels, but he was probably best known for an essay that appeared that year in Harper's Magazine called Perchance to Dream. It lamented the dwindling position of literary fiction in American culture.
00:27:05 Speaker_12
Here Franzen is on Charlie Rose, also in 1996.
00:27:08 Speaker_10
People who read books, who seriously read books, who read a lot of books nowadays, it's like a priori not of the mainstream.
00:27:15 Speaker_12
In the Harper's piece, he wrote that when he was a kid, his dad, who wasn't some great reader, at least knew who James Baldwin and John Cheever were, because they'd been on the cover of Time magazine.
00:27:26 Speaker_12
But Time didn't put serious writers on the cover anymore. Franzen worried that literary writers had lost touch with the mass public, that they just didn't matter. And he set out to change that.
00:27:37 Speaker_10
I wanted to write a book that would be for everybody.
00:27:40 Speaker_12
That's Franzen speaking with Charlie Rose, this time in 2001, about the result of this ambition, The Corrections.
00:27:47 Speaker_12
The Corrections was a big, honking American novel written in ambitious but accessible prose about a Midwestern nuclear family and the way we live now.
00:27:56 Speaker_12
It had a sequence with a hallucinated talking turd, but it was also about a family gathering for one last Christmas. Boris Kochka is the author of Hot House, a history of Franzen's publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
00:28:09 Speaker_09
It was a big family story and it had a lot of heart in it. And FSG, you know, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux knew that it had the opportunity to connect with a large audience.
00:28:18 Speaker_12
All of this makes the Corrections a great example of a paradigm shift about selling out that was already well underway by 2001. Mainstream and commercial culture didn't seem like the urgent threat they once had.
00:28:31 Speaker_12
What a decade earlier had been the defining issue of a generation was losing its potency—and fast. Gen Xers were facing the same dilemma that had once troubled the boomers. They wanted an adult life, children, houses, health insurance.
00:28:46 Speaker_12
Grunge was over, punk had receded back to the underground, and hip-hop was full of artists capably modeling an authenticity that could coexist with brand names and sponsorship deals.
00:28:57 Speaker_12
In 1999, Moby famously licensed every song on his album Play, turning it into a smash. Other musicians followed.
00:29:06 Speaker_12
An article in the New York Times advised that if you want to hear interesting, ambitious, challenging pop music these days, the place to turn is not mainstream radio, but commercials.
00:29:18 Speaker_12
An indie rocker quoted in that same article said having to work another job that takes all your energy from your music is even more selling out. And this was all before file sharing services really began to cut into CD sale revenues.
00:29:34 Speaker_12
Artists didn't have as many options anymore. Bethany Klein is a professor at the University of Leeds in England and the author of Selling Out, Culture, Commerce and Popular Music.
00:29:44 Speaker_05
asking for artists to maintain their integrity in that same way when there were no roots to make a living seems quite cruel, doesn't it?
00:29:53 Speaker_05
I think actually lots of people were really sympathetic and sensitive to what musicians were going through in terms of their limited choices.
00:29:59 Speaker_12
Like I said earlier, selling out is an anxiety of wealth, and as middle-tier artists had less access to it, their skepticism about mainstream popularity and corporate money was fading. And this sentiment was spreading to people who weren't hard up.
00:30:14 Speaker_12
In 1988, when Nike ran a commercial for sneakers scored to the Beatles' revolution, it was a scandal. In 2004, Bob Dylan just appeared in a Victoria's Secret ad.
00:30:24 Speaker_12
Selling out was rapidly transforming from a defining generational concern into the parochial preoccupation of closed-minded old heads. And the corrections seemed in step with this sea change.
00:30:37 Speaker_12
With it, Franzen had made a concerted effort to write a novel that could reach more people than his previous books had. He wanted his book to matter. He wanted to break out of a small literary readership.
00:30:50 Speaker_12
The result was an immediate bestseller and, according to critics, a masterpiece. One glowing review ran on the cover of the New York Times book section.
00:30:59 Speaker_12
The reviewer acknowledged that The Corrections was, in some ways, a conventional family saga, but he wrote, it had just enough novel of paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred.
00:31:13 Speaker_12
But of course, though it wasn't public knowledge yet, Oprah had already assigned it. So now we're back where we started.
00:31:25 Speaker_12
Oprah has selected Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections as the 45th pick of the Oprah Book Club, but she hasn't announced it publicly yet. And given everything we now know, it seems like it should have been a good fit.
00:31:37 Speaker_12
Jonathan Franzen wanted literature, the kind of literature that he writes, to occupy a larger place in American culture. Oprah wanted to enrich her viewers' lives by introducing them to books she loved. They both wanted people to read.
00:31:51 Speaker_12
They both loved the corrections. When Oprah makes the announcement, just a few weeks after September 11th, she gushes. She tells the audience the book is a work of art and sheer genius.
00:32:03 Speaker_12
She says, when critics refer to the great American novel, I think this is it, people. Farris, Strauss, and Giroux had printed an additional 680,000 copies of the novel. And after the announcement, it moved to the top of the bestseller list.
00:32:20 Speaker_12
But something else happened after the announcement, too. Branson suddenly seems very prickly. Here he is on Terry Gross.
00:32:28 Speaker_10
It literally had never once crossed my mind that this might be an Oprah pick, partly because she seldom chooses hardcovers, partly because she does choose a lot of female authors, and partly because, as the reviewer in the New York Times said, this feels too edgy to ever be an Oprah pick.
00:32:48 Speaker_10
And so it never occurred to me.
00:32:50 Speaker_12
He starts giving deeply ambivalent interview after deeply ambivalent interview. In one, he said the selection would probably not sit well with the writers I hang out with and the readers who have been my core audience.
00:33:03 Speaker_12
In another, he asserted that the corrections came out of a high art literary tradition. In another, he said that while he liked some of the books Oprah had chosen in the past, others were schmaltzy and one-dimensional.
00:33:15 Speaker_12
In that interview with Terry Gross, he fretted that Oprah's imprimatur would signal that his book was aimed at women, driving away male readers.
00:33:24 Speaker_10
And now I'm actually at the point with this book where I worry, I'm sorry that it's, I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience.
00:33:33 Speaker_12
These are the kind of things that people who remember this incident tend to remember. They're the kind of thing I remembered, frankly. The kind of thing that still hangs over Franzen's reputation. The snobbishness, the sexism, the needlessness.
00:33:47 Speaker_12
But in the mess of ambivalent comments Franzen was making at this time, there's also plenty about selling out.
00:33:58 Speaker_12
You can hear it in Franzen's reaction to the Oprah book club icon going on the corrections cover, about which he said, And you can hear it in his exchange with an interviewer who told Franzen a friend of his had become hesitant to read the corrections after learning it was an Oprah pick.
00:34:20 Speaker_12
Franzen replied to this by gesturing at those underground rock scenes I mentioned earlier, saying, now I've signed a big label deal and I'm playing stadiums. How good can I be?
00:34:32 Speaker_12
He then went on to disparage himself as someone who had long since sold out and been co-opted. Wesley Morris again.
00:34:39 Speaker_08
He was reacting against like he was he was pavement. He was Sonic Youth. And here comes like Dick Clark trying to put him on American Bandstand.
00:34:49 Speaker_12
But Franzen had wanted American bandstand, or mainstream success anyway. What was his problem? So what I see in Franzen's ambivalence is a guy wondering if he's gone too far.
00:35:05 Speaker_12
He wanted to be a famous literary novelist, a serious writer who was also at the center of the culture. He wanted to be on the cover of Time Magazine. Oprah was the modern-day equivalent of Time Magazine, except she was also on daytime TV.
00:35:20 Speaker_12
Had he somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it, sold out? It's like after moving past it, selling out had jumped up on his shoulders and started whispering in his ears. And in one ear, it was whispering about artistic integrity.
00:35:35 Speaker_12
And in the other ear, it was whispering about status anxiety. These two things have always been the two sides of selling out. The desire to maintain one's authenticity and autonomy, and an impulse to do so by gatekeeping.
00:35:49 Speaker_12
by pushing people away, by sneering at the popular because of who likes things that are popular. When you're protecting something, you're trying to keep it safe, often by keeping people out. So let's look a little more closely at each of these sides.
00:36:04 Speaker_12
I'm going to start with the one that's basically sympathetic to Franzen and to the idea of selling out itself, the side having to do with artistic integrity and authenticity.
00:36:14 Speaker_12
Before the book club announcement, while he was on tour to promote The Corrections, Franzit had met up with the Oprah Winfrey Show crew in St. Louis, his hometown.
00:36:23 Speaker_12
They filmed a segment about the book and his childhood and his family that was meant to air at a later date. Here he is describing it a few weeks later, again on fresh air with Terry Gross.
00:36:32 Speaker_10
I've done the sort of bogus thing where they follow you around with a camera and you try to look natural.
00:36:39 Speaker_12
He later wrote about the experience for The New Yorker. Less dismissively, he explained how uncomfortable he found it, because he was bad at it, because it seemed so phony, because the producers wanted him to talk about his late parents.
00:36:51 Speaker_12
Here he was, an awkward writer whose life's work was to create something authentic and truthful, trying to perform on camera, to feign sincerity and spontaneity over multiple takes.
00:37:02 Speaker_12
At one point he yells at the producer, this is so fundamentally bogus. He acknowledges in the essay that this was an adolescent thing to say. That doesn't mean it wasn't sincere. So that's the first way of looking at Franzen's response.
00:37:16 Speaker_12
He had set out to reach a bigger audience, but now it seemed like reaching that audience would require him to compromise on things that mattered to him. In a format, TV, he found discomfiting.
00:37:26 Speaker_12
But the second way of looking at it is that he came down with a really bad case of status anxiety. Laura Miller is Slate's book critic.
00:37:34 Speaker_06
So Jonathan Franzen was doing this thing that was definitely a little more commercial, as family novels are, but also trying to be part of this sort of highbrow literary scene that was rightly perceived as sort of dominated by men, these big fat novels by men.
00:37:55 Speaker_12
Franzen was famously close friends with David Foster Wallace and a number of other writers of big books that were slightly more difficult than The Corrections.
00:38:04 Speaker_06
What happened when Oprah selected Corrections is that he had an anxiety about how that novel was going to be positioned. Like, it might sell a lot of copies, but would this sort of seal of approval
00:38:22 Speaker_06
kind of tip the scale too much in the direction of, like, commercial domestic fiction.
00:38:29 Speaker_12
If Franzen's highbrow book could be promoted alongside middlebrow fiction on a lowbrow TV show, what did it say about that book?
00:38:39 Speaker_12
Franzen wasn't the only person in the literary world to look down on the book club, to roll their eyes about it and resent that a daytime TV person was setting the reading agenda for America. There was a bookstore in D.C.
00:38:51 Speaker_12
where the staff wore t-shirts that said, not an Oprah book. But most publishing people knew enough to say these things behind closed doors. Franzen wasn't doing that.
00:39:02 Speaker_12
One thing you can see in all of his awkward interviews, the status anxiety got wedded to the authenticity. The only way for Franzen to be himself, to be authentic, was to talk about how confused and uncomfortable he was.
00:39:16 Speaker_12
But it was for a host of unappealing reasons, often having to do with his status anxiety.
00:39:21 Speaker_12
This is how he ends up giving voice to things like his concern about the book not getting any male readers, a concern that implied the women who presumably were his readers or about to become his readers just did not matter.
00:39:34 Speaker_10
I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now in bookstores say, you know, if I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women and I would never touch it.
00:39:49 Speaker_10
Those are male readers speaking.
00:39:51 Speaker_12
This sort of concern has always been a subtext of selling out the dark side of it, the fear that your work might be enjoyed by the wrong people. Bethany Klein.
00:40:03 Speaker_05
We say that we're concerned that, you know, subject to commercialism, the words will be overly influenced and we'll get a different, you know, and not as good and not as important and not as political product out of it.
00:40:14 Speaker_05
But maybe what it's really about is I don't want to be associated with people who are into mainstream stuff.
00:40:23 Speaker_12
Inevitably, Oprah heard about Franzen's remarks. She ignored them for a while. Then she reportedly called FSG and asked, what's his problem? The publisher desperately tried to get Franzen to make nice, but it was too late. Oprah withdrew her invitation.
00:40:38 Speaker_12
She was not unselecting the corrections as a book club pick, but she was disinviting Franzen from appearing on the show. The chill was palpable.
00:40:47 Speaker_12
He is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection, she said in a statement. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. That's when the whole thing became a national news story.
00:41:04 Speaker_12
And the public did not see Franzen as an earnest, if fumbling, author hoping to protect his artistic integrity, or like some rocker resisting corporate culture. They saw him as a pompous snob who didn't appreciate his rare good fortune.
00:41:20 Speaker_12
They saw him as someone who didn't want to be associated with the people, most of them women who watched the Oprah Winfrey show, who didn't want to be associated with the people who read the books they learned about on that show, and who didn't want to be associated with the black woman who selected and introduced those books.
00:41:38 Speaker_12
Fretting about selling out no longer played as noble or principled. It came off as entitled, elitist, or worse. Part of the problem for Franzen was who he'd chosen as a foil.
00:41:50 Speaker_12
Oprah is a TV star and mega producer, a brand who can sell things better than almost anyone else in history. but people don't see her as a corporate suit. She's Oprah, singular, the one and only. People like and admire her.
00:42:04 Speaker_12
And moreover, her version of not selling out, earnestly striving to maintain her personal integrity in a fully corporate context, that's the one more and more people felt committed to. The old idea of selling out had run into the new one,
00:42:24 Speaker_12
and it got trounced. The incident has dogged Franzen's reputation ever since. His work has been lauded, praised, awarded, but for 20 years he's also been known as a lightly toxic great white male.
00:42:35 Speaker_12
His history with Oprah and extra-textual comments much more fundamental to public perception of him than his actual work, which continues to be extremely good.
00:42:45 Speaker_12
As for the book club, soon after the fiasco with The Corrections, Oprah announced she would be picking fewer books a year. Instead of new titles, she started picking more classics by dead authors, who were presumably less of a hassle to deal with.
00:42:59 Speaker_12
She went back to living writers occasionally, including to Franzen himself. In 2010, Oprah and Franzen made up on TV when she picked Freedom, the follow-up to The Corrections, for the book club.
00:43:11 Speaker_13
I gave that author a call to ask permission for it to be our next selection, because we have a little history, the author and I. And after careful consideration, the author said yes. And our newest book club pick is Freedom!
00:43:29 Speaker_12
That same year, Frenzen finally appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In the wake of the Oprah Franzen incident, the idea of selling out continued to wither away, eventually getting to the point it is today.
00:43:46 Speaker_03
Not so long ago at dinner, I said the word selling out and both of my daughters were like, what is that?
00:43:51 Speaker_12
That's Helen Childress, the writer of Reality Bites Again. She's still a screenwriter and a producer.
00:43:56 Speaker_03
And I was like, oh, selling out, you know, when you commercialize something unique about you for the benefit of a corporation or, you know, profit. for money, basically. And they were like, What do you what do you mean?
00:44:12 Speaker_03
I like when you know, like when someone has a sponsored post and they're like, yeah, but what's what's wrong with that? It's so antiquated. It's almost funny.
00:44:21 Speaker_12
To be fair, the idea is very much alive in the context of race and representation, where it's potent in personal conversations.
00:44:29 Speaker_12
And you can also hear it swirling around celebrities, companies and individuals that have expressed or failed to express verbal or material support for social justice causes like Black Lives Matter.
00:44:41 Speaker_12
It makes sense that being called a sellout is still powerful in this context. The charge that one is betraying the interests of people of color stings. The charge that you're trying to commercialize yourself. Not so much.
00:44:57 Speaker_12
Because of course, who among us can afford not to commercialize themselves? On a personal level, we still grapple with integrity, with living a life of value. But we try to do these things while maintaining our brands, our hustles, our influence.
00:45:11 Speaker_12
Even putting aside all the more high-octane ways there are to sell yourself these days, It's nearly impossible to do anything, make a living, live a life without the internet or your phone.
00:45:23 Speaker_12
And that means without immediately being tangled up with some giant business that mediates monitors and profits from everything you do there. Wesley Morris again.
00:45:33 Speaker_08
I think there is just this acceptance, not unlike global warming, that this thing is happening and you just have to learn how to live with it in whatever way you can.
00:45:44 Speaker_12
At the top of the episode, I asked, what happened to Selling Out? And the answer is, it died. And one of the reasons why is right there in the Oprah Franzen incident.
00:45:54 Speaker_12
In it, you can see that Selling Out had mostly become closed-minded, defensive, anxious, all about keeping your stuff from people or making sure that only the right people were enjoying it.
00:46:05 Speaker_12
And as we began to more successfully question who the right people were and move on to a more expansive answer, the old version of selling out started to look to us primarily like status anxiety, like gatekeeping, like snobbery, and good riddance to that.
00:46:22 Speaker_12
But while what had been close-minded about selling out became more odious, what was compelling about it became more difficult. not selling out. It basically became impossible.
00:46:35 Speaker_08
We're talking about individual autonomy. And we are talking about freedom of personal choice. And at what point, I mean, we're kind of past the point of us being unplugged from the thing that has basically taken over everybody's lives.
00:46:56 Speaker_08
We're past that point. Like we have, I mean, so the idea of selling out, I mean, what can you do? We have been bought.
00:47:07 Speaker_12
Franzen and Oprah took place at a time when maintaining any kind of meaningful autonomy from corporate commercial culture was becoming much more difficult. And that's only become more true in the 20 years since it happened.
00:47:21 Speaker_12
As the financial circumstances that enabled a middle class existence for Americans began to dry up, people had to get day jobs, to get on social media, to promote themselves, to sell themselves, to commercialize themselves.
00:47:35 Speaker_12
And it's made us see selling out differently. Selling out really is a time capsule. And I think that's part of the reason when we look at the Oprah Franzen incident, selling out can be hard to see there. For better and worse, we're way past it.
00:48:01 Speaker_12
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoderring at sleep.com. This episode was written by me and produced by Benjamin Frisch.
00:48:13 Speaker_12
It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth. We had research assistance from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Evan Chung, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman with help from Sophie Codner. Derek John is executive producer.
00:48:27 Speaker_12
Merrick Jacob is senior technical director. I want to mention a few books and articles that were really helpful in reporting this piece. There's Kathleen Rooney's Reading with Oprah, the book club that changed America.
00:48:39 Speaker_12
There's Boris Kochka's Hothouse, the art of survival and the survival of art at America's most celebrated publishing house, Farris Strauss and Giroux. Then there's Bethany Cline's Selling Out, culture, commerce, and popular music.
00:48:53 Speaker_12
And then there's also the Baffler compendium, Commodifier Dissent, and Franz Nikolai's article for Slate about the history of calling artists sellouts. Thanks to CJ Farley, Kathleen Rooney, Aisha Harris, and Charity Hudley,
00:49:06 Speaker_12
If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed an Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. and even better, tell your friends. If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.
00:49:31 Speaker_12
Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other podcast without any ads. We're also starting to do Decoder Ring bonus content, and you'll be able to get that too. You also get unlimited access to Slate's website.
00:49:45 Speaker_12
Member support is crucial to our work, so please go to slate.com slash decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. We'll see you in two weeks.