The advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom came with a bonus CD.[1] I’m not sure what was on it. Perhaps Franzen reading his novel’s twenty-six-page prologue? A “book trailer”? A Sims™ module in which you, too, can alienate your neighbors while helping to gentrify St. Paul’s Ramsey Hill neighborhood? I’ll never know. I threw it out, to subtract a few ounces from the tare weight of this 562-page boxcar of a novel. But, as we now know, that CD was the least of the extratextual fanfare trailing Freedom into the public eye.

First there was an accidental endorsement when President Obama was photographed with the book on vacation. Then came the critical notice—though “trumpet voluntary” is putting it more accurately: Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review was transported, even transformed; the Times’s Michiko Kakutani forgot Franzen had called her “the stupidest person in New York City” long enough to praise Freedom as “galvanic” and an “indelible portrait of our times.” There followed a bitter but mercifully short-lived debate about gender bias at the Times, or, as Meghan O’Rourke put it, “why
women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists.”

Just when it seemed the “narrative” might shift to the book itself, from the outburst of enthusiasm it had enjoyed, Oprah Winfrey did the unthinkable, i.e., the inevitable: She made Freedom her Book Club selection. Winfrey had bestowed this honor on Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, only to withdraw it when Franzen voiced