Melville House Books

It’s been eight years since Jonathan Franzen showed an astonishing ability to say increasingly stupid and insulting things about Oprah Winfrey and her audience day after day after day for months, from saying he didn’t want her “corporate logo” on his book (the one of his international conglomerate publisher was enough, thank you), to whining that she ran a “coffee klatch” that was off-putting to men. And who could forget the Nixonian reasonings of: “To find myself being in the position of giving offense to someone who’s a hero — not a hero of mine per se, but a hero in general — I feel bad in a public-spirited way.”

Well, if you’ve missed the daily episode of “Watch Me Put My Foot Even Further Down my Gullet,” take heart: he still can’t resist giving her a really awkward zetz when opportunity knocks. To wit, this huge, “exclusive” interview with The Daily Beast that is all of one sentence long, in which he says he a little verklempt about the latest news concerning Oprah: “Oprah’s show is the last place on the networks where serious books still sometimes get a hearing, so it’s sad to learn of her impending retreat to cable.”

To review, not all the books she discussed were “serious,” whatever they were they only “sometimes” were given a fair “hearing,” and her move to cable is a demotion. Ergo, he must have been right to diss her way back when, eh?

Better still: Watch him try to answer the question in the clip below.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.