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Franzen and Rogers Battle for Alice’s Affections
Who loves Alice more? CBC Schoolmarm Shelagh Rogers had wanted to interview Alice Munro for seventeen years before she got the chance to fawn over the Gilleress last week. And spectacled Jonathan Franzen made a spectacle of his love for Alice in the pages of the Times Book Review yesterday. Torontoist hasn’t read Runaway yet, but we listened to a lively Talking Books panel on the work, one in which New Yorker Adam Gopnik used the word ‘expatriated’ with such frequency that we had to wonder if he was launching a campaign to bring greater popularity to the unruly term. As for Alice, we’re happy for her. We hope she wins the Nobel. We like grand dames who wear sunglasses indoors. But we also really like the BlackBook Mag challenge, the one where they ask readers to put people in the ring together (the interview ring, that is). We’d like to see Franzen and Rogers duke it out. Alice proclaims the victor.