Word: oprahism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...called Robert. Of course, there’s also “Roheeet” and “Ro-shit.” People seem to have been able to figure out my last name ever since Deepak Chopra became famous and started showing up on Oprah all the time. Yet, I was still called “Road Head” Chopra more than once...
During the worst of his falling out last year with Oprah Winfrey, it was hard to tell that Jonathan Franzen is one of the most nuanced minds at work in the dwindling republic of letters. It's easy to tell that from How to Be Alone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages), a collection of lucid, saturnine essays that have appeared in various magazines since 1994. Franzen is not the first serious writer to mourn the slow death of serious reading or to be worried about the decay of the moral imagination, each a continuing subtheme in a book that lights...
Only one of the 13 pieces here addresses the Oprah incident, when Franzen voiced doubts about having The Corrections, his supremely successful third novel, selected for her book club. As most everyone knows, it was quickly unselected, and Franzen was cast in some places as the world's dumbest whiner. What was his problem? You get a glimpse of it in an essay describing the tortured afternoon last year when an Oprah film crew prodded him into a contrived visit to his childhood home. That ordeal by television caused him to break out in an itchy rash. But he suffers...
Franzen has very little quarrel with Oprah. His real problem, and one that he lays out with care all through the book, is with a world in which the interior life becomes ever more threadbare as the means to sustain it--especially the essential consolations of serious reading--wither away. In tones that are sober but never lugubrious, Franzen weighs the pressures upon the self in a culture that manages the neat trick of discouraging real solitude and genuine community, substituting for both the paradox of media-overloaded isolation. "The first lesson reading teaches," he writes...
...Janet Fitch novel (and Oprah book) that inspired this perfect-child-in-a-rotten-world drama is a cozy read. Teenage foster child Astrid (Alison Lohman) has monumentally bad luck with mother figures (Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn, Renee Zellweger) but endures by taking on the attitudes of the women who disappoint her. Somehow the viewer endures too, because Lohman's pensive loveliness carries the film...