Memoir as fiction? Not so fast.

It turns out Jonathan Franzen was right.

Franzen, you'll recall, got himself tarred and feathered a few years back for having the temerity to rebuff Oprah Winfrey after she selected his novel ''The Corrections" for her book club.

With his horn-rimmed glasses and tortured delivery, Franzen made for an ideal whipping boy. He was the egghead snob who slighted Oprah and, by extension, her readers.

Franzen's point, before he caved to industry pressure, was that he didn't feel comfortable having his book slapped with a seal of approval. He also found some of Oprah's picks schmaltzy.

In an essay later published in The New Yorker, Franzen wrote about the strange, unsettling process of Oprahfication: being pushed, for instance, to visit his hometown for a contrived TV segment. His reluctance to kowtow to the queen of daytime television is looking more and more sensible, in light of recent events.

By which I mean the James Frey event.

For those who missed the story, a brief recap. Several years ago the former screenwriter penned a novel about a young man battling his drug addiction. It was shopped to 17 publishing houses, all of which passed. Legendary editor Nan Talese finally agreed to publish ''A Million Little Pieces" as a memoir, presumably after Frey removed the fictional elements.

The book eventually came to the attention of Oprah, who selected it for her book club last month, invited Frey onto her show, and lauded him as an inspirational hero who had conquered his demons. The book shot to No. 1 on bestseller lists and has sold 3 1/2 million copies.

Then, two weeks ago, investigative reports confirmed what many skeptical readers had long suspected: Crucial events in the book were embellished or fabricated.

Frey claims, for instance, to have run into a police officer with his car, suffered a severe beating from the cops, and gone to prison for three months. The reality: He ran his car over a curb and went to jail for a few hours. There's no need to detail all of Frey's creations. Such a list would be impossible to compile anyway, because many of the folks who could contradict him are dead. Given that he's been found out, you might expect Frey to offer an apology. Instead, he went on ''Larry King Live" and explained that most of the book hadn't been ''contested." Toward the end of the program, Oprah called in to deem the affair ''much ado about nothing" and to reiterate her endorsement.

That sound you hear is the happy ding of cash registers drowning out hypocrisy.

It's difficult to know where to start when so many people are behaving shamelessly. But let's start with Frey himself.

Like that of all great hucksters in our tabloid age, his central work is not as an author, but image-maker.

He spends a lot of time -- on the page and off -- portraying himself as a dangerous character. He apes the swagger and vocabulary of hip-hop stars. He disses his rivals and calls his critics ''haters."

In fact, Frey is the Vanilla Ice of American letters. He's a rich white kid whose self-loathing led to a drug problem. He cleaned up, tried to sell screenplays, tried to sell a novel, and finally decided to market himself, by inventing enough infamy to grant him street cred.

Our lurid and gullible culture did the rest. His publishers didn't bother to verify his outrageous stories. They used his criminal past -- and ''fearless candor," to quote his editor -- as their chief marketing tools.

And Oprah bit. She was drawn to the book, at least in part, because of Frey's alleged mayhem. As she told her viewers, ''I kept turning to the back of the book to remind myself, 'He's alive. He's OK.' "

To Oprah, Frey was the ex-addict with the heart of gold, the bad seed who survived his trip to hell and returned with self-help platitudes dipped in gangster dialect.

Oprah now knows that Frey never went through all of what he claims to have, that he changed facts to make himself appear more brave and troubled and endangered than he was. But rather than express regret, or admit she's been had, she has brushed the issue aside and moved on to tomorrow's show.

This is the sense in which Franzen was right: Oprah isn't just about the promotion of literature. She's also about the mass marketing of sentiment.

The fact that she would choose ''A Million Little Pieces" in the first place may be her most damning act. The book is a by-the-numbers recovery narrative: an ersatz taste of life on the edge, with the assurance of a happy ending.

For all its macho posing, Frey's prose is wretchedly sentimental; his characters are straight out of central casting. The book reads more like a screenplay (imagine that) than an honest accounting of anyone's life. Readers aren't asked to regard addiction in a new light, merely to confirm their stereotypes, as seen in a thousand made-for-TV movies.

The saddest aspect of the Frey affair isn't that it exposes the cynicism of Oprah, but of the publishing industry.

Book makers are so desperate for sales, so starved for readers, that few have the guts to express the appropriate outrage. ''If it's OK with the money people, it's OK with us" seems to be the motto. Frey is not a conniving fraud, the argument goes, but was merely blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction.

The notion that a memoir should contain, uh, you know, the truth, seems to have fallen by the wayside.

As Morgan Entrekin, the president of Grove/Atlantic, recently explained, ''It's impossible to establish with certainty the factual accuracy of every piece of nonfiction we publish; we would grind to a halt."

This seems an odd claim, given that newspapers and magazines fact-check their stories, working on a deadline of days, while most books spend months in production.

Regardless, I sure wish I knew this five years ago, when Entrekin published my first book of short stories, ''My Life in Heavy Metal." I could have recast the book as a memoir (''My Life as a Sexual Addict"), gotten myself arrested for lewd and lascivious conduct, and made us rich.

Frey's publisher, Doubleday, isn't forcing its author to come clean. Instead, it's been content to slap future editions of the book with a watery disclaimer and to count the booty. The current scandal has only stoked sales.

This is what publishers want today: controversy, a juicy angle, a marketable persona, a celebrity tie-in, an ''inspirational story" that will attract the relevant media.

Frey is but one example. JT Leroy is another.

Leroy was, to his readers, a cause celebre, a former teenage male prostitute who converted his pain into the searing prose of several books and became the darling of A-list Hollywood. The only problem being that JT Leroy apparently never existed. He appears to be the figment of a middle-aged couple who, when necessary, enlisted a relative to play Leroy.

The lesson is clear: The story only sells if you have a tragic mascot to lure in the crowds.

So what if you have to lie? So what if you appropriate the suffering of disenfranchised populations? Isn't that what America in the post-9/11 era is all about? We're a country firmly dedicated to self-victimization, even as we're launching wars.

The bottom line is that publishers aren't really that interested in literature anymore. There's just not enough profit there. They like the idea of literature. They like feeling that they are engaged in the pursuit of elevating the human spirit. Like Oprah and many readers, they embrace the convenient, self-congratulatory aspects of literature.

But that's not the same as embracing its deepest virtues: the ability to make us see our world and ourselves anew, to expose our delusions, to engage our most unbearable feelings.

The work of a writer resides, above all, in an effort to divine human truths and to transmit these through the inconvenient medium of language.

But it's the wrong era for truth and inconvenience, and the right era for guys like Frey. He's not paying for his deceptions -- he's getting paid. Riverhead Books has given him an advance for his next two novels. Warner Brothers plans to make ''A Million Little Pieces" into a movie.

Listening to him dodge questions and pound his talking points on ''Larry King," Frey sounded more like George W. Bush than Ernest Hemingway. ''I don't think I'd change anything," he declared.

And why should he? Why bother with humility or honest self-reflection? That's for suckers.

In the absence of a morally responsible publisher -- or reading public -- economic might makes right. That's often been the case in politics. It now appears to be the abiding law of literature as well.

Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, ''My Life in Heavy Metal" and ''The Evil B. B. Chow," and the nonfiction book ''Candyfreak."