JONATHAN Franzen, whose new novel, ''The Corrections,'' is a best seller, recently got into some trouble for being less than overjoyed at his book's selection by Oprah Winfrey for her on-air book club. ''I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition,'' he asserted in one of a series of interviews that resulted in his disinvitation from Ms. Winfrey's talk show and inspired an orgy of populist finger-wagging.

It was probably the ''high'' that provoked most of the outrage, and Mr. Franzen was duly scolded for his snobbery (mostly by fellow members of the literary elite), and for the ingratitude of turning up his nose at the prospect of selling another half-million copies.

But from the perspective of literary history rather than industry gossip the red flag word in Mr. Franzen's statement is ''solidly.'' The novelist may feel comfortable breathing Parnassian air, but the novel his book and the genre itself does not. Since its beginnings in the 18th century, the Western novel was a bastard form, the chaotic hybrid of art and commerce as likely to offend norms of high literature as to uphold them. The ''high-art literary tradition'' was, in Augustan England, the preserve of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and the great figures of antiquity, in contrast to whom the popular novelists of the day -- a redundancy, since no other kind existed -- were hawkers of morally dubious entertainment.

The political and cultural ascendancy of the middle class increased the novel's popularity and prestige, giving rise in the 19th century to the predicament in which Mr. Franzen currently finds himself. How could writers with grand aesthetic ambitions distinguish themselves from the purveyors of cheap romance and Gothic sensationalism, when the available barometer of literary success -- good sales -- made no such distinction? Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert and Henry James did not disdain commercial success, but rather, like Mr. Franzen, sought it in terms that did not threaten their image of themselves as serious artists. When James, late in his career, gathered his novels into a standard edition, he was not only erecting a monument to his own genius, but also embarking on a business venture. The edition would be sold by subscription to readers of refinement and taste, of whom he hoped there would be many thousands. The public's indifference was a shock and a disappointment.

But the history of American literature in the 20th century is in many ways a history of marketing schemes that succeeded where James failed. The Modern Library and the Book-of-the-Month Club in the 1920's, the quality papberback revolution of the postwar years -- all these ventures were undertaken to bring the masterpieces of modernism to a mass audiences. In the same manner, the popular magazines of the 1920's, like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, featured important writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather and John Dos Passos. Ms. Winfrey, in the postmodern culture of celebrity and on a scale made possible by the reach of television, is following in the footsteps of wily literary entrepreneurs like Bennett Cerf, Clifton Fadiman and Jason Epstein.

And this is the problem. The Oprah Book Club, like the Book-of-the-Month Club before it, represents a triumph of the middle brow. This is something serious writers cannot help but regard with ambivalence, because it threatens to lump their books together with products they deem inferior, and to level the distinctions that allow them to see themselves as serious in the first place. From Sinclair Lewis to Ann Beattie, from John Cheever to Jonathan Franzen, the middle class has provided novelists with subject matter -- and also with readers and the result is that writers must court the favor of the people whose way of life they anatomize.