LITERARY BREAK-OUT WITH HIS THIRD NOVEL, 'THE CORRECTIONS,' JONATHAN FRANZEN HAS REWRITTEN THE RULES.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

In a world of authors scraping to get just a smidgen of attention paid to their efforts, Jonathan Franzen has done the unthinkable: He's said, in effect, thanks but no thanks to Oprah Winfrey.

Franzen, whose third novel, ``The Corrections,'' has emerged as the literary sensation of the fall season - it's received almost uniformly ecstatic reviews, many proclaiming it that ever-elusive ``great American novel,'' and has been nominated for the National Book Award - felt that Winfrey's stamp of approval compromised the book's literary integrity, and groused, however good-naturedly, about the Oprah insignia appearing on his book's cover.

A miffed Winfrey canceled her segment in which she was to dine with Franzen and selected viewers.

Reached after the decision, Franzen said he was ``surprised and disappointed'' about her decision. ``I feel terrible that certain unwise remarks of mine, taken out of context, hurt the feelings of a woman who is a reader of mine, an admirer of my work, and one of the real forces of good in the literary life of the nation. I have the greatest respect for and gratitude to readers of all kinds.''

Franzen spoke with the Daily News before Winfrey withdrew the ``Corrections'' segment, but many of his statements were similar to those that prompted her action.

Were a serious reader to see the Oprah logo on his book, Franzen said, ``You wouldn't read it. Exactly! You'd think it's going to be some schmaltzoid, one-dimensional issues book.''

Franzen had already shot some material for Winfrey's program when the announcement was made. Winfrey, who had selected the book personally and declared it ``the best 648 pages I've read in years,'' on Tuesday released a statement: ``Jonathan Franzen will not be on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict ... We're moving on to the next book.''

A discounted work?

Franzen said he never even considered that his book - which concerns the internecine relationships and turmoil of an average Midwestern family - might become an Oprah book (for one thing, there's not a whole lot of female self-empowerment going on within its pages). ``There was no suspense on my part - might this become an Oprah book? You could just as well ask, 'Might I become an honorary citizen of Venezuela?' ''

Once Winfrey named the book a part of her book club in September, Franzen said, ``I feel the book got split in two in some modern-physics-type way. One is going on its trajectory, without the corporate logo and finding its way to folks who shop in independent bookstores, and version two is finding its way into Wal-Marts and Costcos.''

Franzen's book had found its way onto The New York Times best-seller list before Winfrey's announcement, but since her coronation, it has lodged itself in the No. 1 position. And, to be fair to Winfrey, she has made acclaimed literary novels part of her book club in the past: Jane Hamilton's ``A Map of the World'' and Barbara Kingsolver's ``The Poisonwood Bible'' are but two examples.

``The Corrections'' concerns the Lambert family of the Midwestern town of St. Jude (appropriately, the patron saint of lost causes): patriarch Alfred, whose disappointed aspirations for a better life while he worked for a railroad have disappeared into the fog of Parkinson's disease, and long-suffering matriarch Enid, who has a last couple of schemes up the sleeve of her dowdy housedress.

They have three equally dysfunctional children: Gary, the oldest, is the stolid straight arrow in a miserable marriage; he plans verbal encounters with his wife as strategically as a field general. Chip and Denise are the putative free spirits; their rebellion results in a form of misery only slightly more exotic than that suffered by the pragmatic, by-the-book Lamberts. Denise runs a successful restaurant until her sexual peccadilloes land her in boiling water; Chip flees the country for Lithuania, where he becomes a lieutenant in an ambitious (and hilarious) Internet scam.

Critics find they can't praise the book enough. David Gates, himself a provocative essayist on American anomie (``Preston Falls''), wrote in The New York Times Book Review, ``While we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read.'' Walter Kirn, whose novel ``Up in the Air'' was the book du jour before ``The Corrections,'' raved in GQ, ``challenging, worthy and hugely energetic, yet ... more engaging and readable than other chilly magnum opuses in the same league.''

Even the stuffy Wall Street Journal cheered, employing a baseball metaphor to enthuse, ``Bystanders will be forgiven the instinct to whistle in awe as they watch the ball disappear into the furthest reaches of contemporary fiction.'' The book was also optioned by Hollywood producer Scott Rudin; when told that it's too internal to make a good film, Franzen playfully put a finger to his lips, shushing his inquisitor.

Third time a charm

What makes this even more impressive is ``The Corrections'' is only Franzen's third novel, a whopping nine years and thousands of discarded pages in the making, following two well-reviewed but essentially overlooked books, ``The Twenty-Seventh City'' (a stuffed, visionary screed about politics in Franzen's hometown of St. Louis, written in his 20s) and ``Strong Motion'' (about apocalyptic earthquakes). It also follows a much-commented-upon essay Franzen wrote for Harpers magazine that essentially called into question the importance of important novels.

``I did make myself visible in a plaintive way in this Harpers essay,'' recalled Franzen, who awaited his interviewer outside his hotel, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Franzen's a patrician, soft-spoken kind of guy, though apparently not patrician or soft-spoken enough, since he reported that his baggage had been hand-searched at the airport on each of the five previous legs of his book tour.

Franzen conceded his essay was audacious, saying, in effect, ``I know I'm better than you and you and you - and I'm a lot more fun to read than you and you and you. I really, truly felt - I didn't know people who were writing much better literary entertainments than I was in the period that I wrote 'Twenty-Seventh City' and 'Strong Motion' and I got nothing back.''

Franzen spent years and thousands of pages on an earlier version of ``The Corrections,'' envisioning it as the Ultimate Social Novel. ``It was filled with Big Plot touching on hot-button issues,'' he recalled, somewhat self-deprecatingly.

`` 'The Corrections' originally referred to a set of prison stories at the center of the book and the way those stories intersected with a set of stock-market stories. So there was this enormously involved Securities and Exchange Commission internal investigation uncovering black nationalists' conspiracy in underground Philly connecting in with the Catholic worker connecting in with the Midwest connecting in with the university connecting with - I don't even remember what all was in there. But yeah, it was a monster.'' He laughs, then adds some more elements that he tried to shoehorn into that sprawling vision.

Eventually, he realized he could accomplish much the same thing by focusing on individuals: ``So the change in direction was small - let's find the world refracted in a raindrop,'' he explained. A quartet of the characters from the original book may find their way into his next novel.

Proud, yet uneasy

The author admitted his Midwestern parents, now deceased (his father suffered from a degenerative brain ailment like ``The Corrections'' ' Alfred), have informed, yet resisted, his writing.

``My mother couldn't have read this,'' he revealed. ``She couldn't really read any of my fiction. She'd turn the pages of the novels, she'd note that there was a sex scene there that made her extremely uncomfortable and sorry that friends of hers were going to be seeing the book. But she couldn't really read it. She would've recognized the kind of thing it is and said, 'that makes me really uncomfortable, and I'm going to turn the pages all that much faster and I'm going to be so happy when I'm done because I'll be able to enjoy every minute of his success.'

``My father was actually a good reader for 'The Twenty-Seventh City,' though all he said was, 'You draw good pictures with words' and 'You know a lot of things.' ''

Franzen, who breezily described himself as ``a not un-self-conscious writer,'' insisted that writing his next book, in the light of heightened expectations, couldn't be any more difficult than his ``Corrections'' experience.

While writing this, he reported, ``I hit 40, a dreadful birthday, and I still had four-fifths of this book to write. My mother had just died. I felt like I was going nowhere. I don't think there's any kind of pressure that would match that pressure. Now there are some expectations. I feel less fazed by those expectations - you can't put more pressure on me than I felt for the last five years. Those could be famous last words, but I really feel you could not be in more of a panic.

``With that said, I'm hoping to get back to work in November. I have fond hopes that I can finish in a year and a half or two, which probably means three or four. I don't think it'll be nine years this time.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) Jonathan Franzen has received critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination for ``The Corrections.''

Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press

(2) An Oprah-free cover - the author had said that her stamp of approval would keep serious readers away.