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EXCLUSIVE: What does it say about how we value our literary lions now when Jonathan Franzen is the first living author placed on Time magazine’s cover since Stephen King appeared there a decade ago? Now producer Scott Rudin has closed a deal for movie rights to Freedom, the first novel that Jonathan Franzen has published since his National Book Award winner The Corrections nearly 10 years earlier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux doesn’t officially publish the book until August 31. Freedom’s focus is the slowly disintegrating relationship of Patty and Walter Berglund, 
socially conscious college sweethearts, who lose each other and their own moral compasses over the years to temptations both corporate and carnal. Early reviews say its richly drawn characters compares favorably with The Corrections, which Rudin years back also optioned. Scott hasn’t yet set up Freedom at a studio or assigned a writer to adapt it. But I’m told Franzen’s reps at CAA completed the deal just before the issue of Time hit newsstands today. The venerable newsweekly has put many authors on its cover over the years, including J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, George Orwell, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, John Updike, John Irving and Michael Crichton.
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I’m sure it’s as great a book as “The Corrections,” but it won’t sell. Franzen’s arrogant blow-off of Oprah and subsequent attitude made him lots of book industry enemies.
I hope Rudin didn’t overpay…wait….Rudin and Franzen are birds of a feather, so I hope he did!
Oh, screw Oprah. Despite her reach, she doesn’t scream “literary.” Dude’s got the right after slaving away on his first novel to control and protect his art as he sees fit.
It’s not arrogance, it’s quality control. What about Oprah’s arrogance in calling James Frey onto his show to publicly embarrass him? Say what you will, but MILLION LITTLE PIECES is a great novel and there was no reason for her to do what she did.
A Million Little Pieces was trashy schlock, but Oprah was still wrong to do that to Frey.
The prob w/A Million Little Pieces was that it was sold as a memoir not a novel. So as a memoir, it was a great novel. The prob w/ the new Franzen is that its basically Revolutionary Road. And we all know what a resounding failure that film was.
As for refusing Oprah – maybe it was the hardcore confidentiality contract you are forced to sign to get on the show – maybe Franzen figured it wasnt worth it.
Frey’s novel is garbage. Give me an entire page of his prose and I’ll show you why, from sentence construction, to music, to a lack of depth — it’s trash.
After reading that comment, I can only imagine the feedback you’d have given to Toni Morrison, Joyce, Faulkner, or any number of literary figures had they been subjected to a writing workshop with you. Whether or not Frey’s book was fiction, memoir, or creative nonfiction, it’s still a hell of a piece of writing.
I wouldn’t have read the book if Oprah had endorsed it. She is not exactly an intellectual.
I don’t know what you mean by intellectual, but she’s probably extremely intelligent. She’s certainly made a series of brilliant moves to become the most successful woman ever.
Umm… yeah, Oprah tagged this in her book club.
This time Franzen would do well to avoid biting the hand that feeds him, as he did when he offended Oprah by being snarky after she selected “The Corrections” for her book club. With book sales way down, and brick & mortar bookstores scrambling to stay open and solvent, Farrar Straus, and by extension, Franzen himself, need all the good will they can muster.
Are book sales WAY down? Or is it just traditional “analog” book sales? eBooks are doing pretty darn well. The only difference is not so much the sales themselves as it is the finally financial tally being that eBooks cost about ten bucks less.
Yes, eBook sales are up. The migration has begun.
There are no women on that list. Were they any on TIME’s cover?
Toni Morrison once made it to Newsweek.
So Rudin sits on THE CORRECTIONS for a decade and Franzen awards him with the rights to his new novel. That makes sense.
Yeah, Robert Zemeckis was supposed to direct it years ago.
It makes total sense: If there’s any producer who is likely to make a worthy adaptation of a literary novel it’s Rudin. Whether or not it gets made isn’t a concern to Franzen (my hunch is that he’d rather not see it come to life), he still gets his big payday.
I’m waiting until they feature Thomas Pynchon on the cover of Time.
How do you know he wasn’t already on it — we just didn’t know it?
Seriously…why not option the book to a producer who will get these books made? What is Rudin waiting for? Too busy making IT’S COMPLICATED?
if jonathan franzen hadn’t asked oprah winfrey to blow him, we wouldn’t be discussing this at this moment and he would’ve disappeared into oblivion just like most writers from the oprah book club.
Disappear after selling a million little copies and staying on best seller list and having your novel turned into a movie I wish I was so lucky!!!
At this juncture, Franzen is the American novelist’s only hope, the last vestige to keep literary novels alive.
I’m sure, on some level, he’s quite aware of this responsibility.
No wonder it took him ten years to write this.
Godspeed!
Yeah, that Cormac McCarthy has totally gone to seed.
Iggy, Watch your hero worship.
The Corrections was a disappointment – a long book with some good sequences but not much overall focus. Let’s hope this one doesn’t overreach again. Franzen is a very good minor novelist with a complex.
Just wondering how the ebook preorders are compared to the Hardbook preorders.
Scott Rudin clearly has friends in the NYC publishing industry that helped him get a “first look” at Franzen’s yet to be published novel.
As a historical note, It’s the same connection that David O. Selznik had with his wife Irene Selznik, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who had inside connections in the NYC publishing world.
Irene’s insider connections led to her husband getting the rights to “Gone With The Wind”
I remember quite clearly, when art directing In and Out, Scott Rudin whispered in my ear that he had bought the rights to Angela’s Ashes.
That didn’t work out.
The “insider connection” for David O.Selznick was a scout named Kay Brown who survived all the agency mergers over the decades and ended her career well into her senior years at I.C.M. She represented the Margaret Mitchell estate all of that time. Everybody called her Miss Brown.
Thanks to Oprah millions of people embraced and began to love reading give her some credit!! I read everybook and became an avid reader!!
I agree, the book was completely over-hyped. It just wasn’t that good.
Oh, for God’s sake people, Colum McCann writes circles around Franzen and — without the attitude.
For the record: I am not now nor have I ever been an agent to or friend of Colum McCann.
In Franzen’s book of essays, ‘How To Be Alone”, he writes about the Oprah incident, and one gets his perspective on the event, which basically boils down to this – the poor guy had a panic attack. I actually started to cry when I read his account of what he had to go through to be on the segment, and how the producers were asking him to do and reveal very painful, personal details of his life.
He also made a point of thanking Oprah for her enthusiastic response to the book, and admitted that “The Corrections” would not have gotten anywhere near the publicity it did, had it not been for the whole brouhaha,
Please read his essay about it before you judge – he is so brutally honest about his own shortcomings, and never says a bad word about Oprah.
The readers on this site don’t care about Franzen or his writing. They care about sales. These are people who call themselves “producer” but don’t give a shit about “movies.”
I got about halfway through “The Corrections” and just got tired of it. I know Frazen is a great writer, its more than evident in “The Corrections”, but as a “storyteller” he lost me. I doubt I will read his new book when it comes out. Compared to his contemporaries like Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem his characters are just not engaging enough to sustain a book as long as “The Corrections”.
Jonathan Franzen is perhaps the most insightful literary novelist alive today. His ability to hone in on the American psyche and contemporary issues is unmatched. He certainly had every right to say, “Thanks but no thanks,” to Oprah. Oprah has made some good and bad choices for her Book Club. For anyone to think that his choice not to be a guest was arrogant, you are taking away the “Freedom,” that he appears to satirize in his new book. Having to pander to Oprah and her advertisers so that your literary work becomes “popular,” would water down Franzen as an author as a principled individual in a “free” society. Who cares what Oprah thinks and who cares what Franzen does. Let freedom ring!