UNCOMMERCIAL FICTION
By
The relation between art and commerce is a complicated question for any artist who wants to make art that makes money, and for that artist's customers too—too complicated to be resolved either by pretending that novelists like Weldon ought to be above base monetary concerns or by rushing to condemn novelists like Franzen who maintain that they're different from commercial novelists and proud of it. Now that Franzen has won the National Book Award from the same organization that two years ago presented a special award to Oprah for promoting reading, maybe the Oprah logo defacing copies of The Corrections could be hidden under a proudly uncommercial NBA logo. Or maybe a jeweled pin could be given away with each copy—if only Franzen were willing to retitle his opus The Bulgari Corrections.