Franzen, who had been traveling across country on a tour to promote “The Corrections,” had left behind a trail of remarks made to members of the press asking how he felt to have his new novel chosen by the talk show host. Taken all together, those remarks suggest pretty strongly that Franzen considered selection for the Oprah book club to be a kind of stigma. He told the Oregonian that he had considered turning down the show. “She’s picked some good books,” Franzen said in an interview posted on Powells.com, “but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself …” Although the rest of the quote read “even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight,” damage was done.

Franzen has apologized and clarified, blamed his own inexperience in handling the media and attributed his reservations to not wanting to see a “corporate logo” on the cover of his book — but it will be difficult for him to erase the impression that snobbishness caused him to diss Winfrey. And so, alas. Alas because “The Corrections” is a very fine book, one of the best I’ve read in several years, and Franzen is a well-intentioned, hardworking, serious and very talented writer whose work I’ve long admired (full disclosure: I know Franzen socially). “Oprah Winfrey is bent on demonstrating that estimates of the size of the audience for good books is too small,” Franzen told the New York Times Wednesday, “and that is why it is so unfortunate that this is being cast as arrogant Franzen and popular Winfrey.”

Fixing that bit of typecasting will be as hard as any of the “corrections” attempted by Franzen’s characters, partly because there are so many people who are primed to believe the worst of him. His lapse hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. America’s book culture too often seems composed of two resentful camps, hunkered down in their foxholes, lobbing the occasional grenade at each other and nursing their grievances. One side sees itself as scorned by a snooty self-styled elite and the other sees itself as keepers of the literary flame, neglected by a vulgarian mainstream that would rather wallow in mediocrity and dreck. Each side remains exquisitely sensitive to perceived rejection from the other, and the fact that one is often characterized as female and the other as male resonates with the edgy relations between the sexes of late.

This divide in the reading public is also a place where the submerged class anxieties of American life flare up. Conversations about books are often rife with silly agendas, each speaker intent on indicating just how high (or, in the case of contrarians, low) his or her brow can go. It’s astonishing sometimes how dismissive and venomous readers can be when talking about authors they don’t like, or think they don’t like. Even if you do loathe the novels of, say, William Gass or Anne Tyler, unless you’re a student you can hardly claim with any credibility that they’re being thrust down your throat. Such nastiness is stupid and pointless. Film buffs got over this stuff years ago; thanks to critics like Pauline Kael, it’s possible to like Bergman without having to badmouth the Farrelly brothers. In fact, it’s entirely possible to enjoy both.

Furthermore, when a particular novel, like “The Corrections,” comes out to almost universally positive reviews (the New Republic — which pursues a formulaic policy of waiting to see which novels everyone else likes so that it can run an essay about how all other critics are sadly misguided dupes — doesn’t count), it and its author are regarded with not just suspicion but a kind of reflexive antipathy. Everyone’s had the experience of disliking a book — or a movie, or a record — that some critic raved about; that’s not what I mean. The more enthusiastic reviews a novel gets, the less convinced certain book people are that it has any merit.