From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Read Them and Weep
Oprah's books portray a dismal, joyless world.
What kind of world is it where the men lie, cheat and kill, the women are suicidal alcoholics and adulterers, and the children are unloved, abused and kidnapped?
It's Oprah Winfrey's world, the one populated by the characters in the 43 books Oprah's Book Club has endorsed since its inception in September 1996. Five years later, a nod from Oprah still means the fast track to best-seller lists. Oprah has chosen some wonderful books and some terrible ones. As a body of literature, however, they portray the modern world as unrelentingly treacherous and joyless, the antithesis of Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon.
Usually set in small towns, often in the South, Oprah Club books feature the kinds of people who work double shifts just to stay ahead of the repo man. They are nurses, teachers, dry cleaners, clerks, supermarket baggers, small-business owners and highway workers. More emotional than intellectual, they often find themselves puzzled by how they got themselves into such terrible messes. "No one had decided on this," thinks Beth Cappardora about her impending separation from her husband in "The Deep End of the Ocean." "Things just happened. And once they happened they were irrevocable."
Like Oprah Winfrey herself in childhood, the heroines of these books are usually victims of oppression--social, racial, sexual, economic and, especially, familial. Typically, a girl or woman believes she's stuck in a dungeon of--take your pick--abandonment, abuse, persecution, bereavement, addiction, poverty, loneliness, bigotry or mental illness. After an epiphany, she realizes she must marshal her gumption (often for the kids' sake) and strike out on her own. Sadder but wiser, she resigns herself to her imperfect fate and, naturally, haunting memories.
"Even a glass of beer could trigger a splintery recollection," notes the heroine of "The Pilot's Wife," whose husband, after perishing in an airplane crash, is revealed to be a bigamist. "She had learned to live with [her memories], like learning to live with a tic or a stutter or a bad knee that occasionally sent a jolt of pain through the body."
Taken individually, Oprah's books run the gamut from absorbing to vacuous. Both of Wally Lamb's novels--"She's Come Undone" and "I Know This Much Is True"--are smart and complex. The one book translated from another language, "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink, is a powerful tale of Germany before and after World War II. Jane Hamilton, Alice Hoffman and Toni Morrison are graceful storytellers.
But no dictionary is required for most of these works, nor is an appreciation for ambiguity or abstract ideas. The biggest literacy challenge of some Oprah books is their length. "I Know This Much Is True" is 901 pages; "Songs in Ordinary Time," 740 pages; "We Were the Mulvaneys," 454 pages. It seems a shame that people who are moved to read a book on Oprah's recommendation don't get the benefit of judicious editing.
Surveyed as a collection, Oprah's choices are predictable and parochial. She knows what her audience wants--tragedy and redemption--and that's what she serves. Does she know for a fact that members of her flock wouldn't occasionally want to read about success, fulfillment or happiness, or can't grapple with the vast gray area between black and white? That they couldn't be tempted by fiction that incorporates careers, politics, world affairs, higher education, sports, business or the environment? Other contemporary authors working the same territory as Oprah's writers--Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo, Terry McMillan, Stephen McCauley and Kent Haruf, to name a few--balance the inevitable tragedies of life with a delight in its many joys. Their characters are more than the sum of their problems.
A shocking number of people also die in Oprah's books, often violently. They drown, crash and hang themselves; they're strangled, smothered and stabbed. "Ruby lifted his poker way over his head and then he came down on May with all his strength," writes Jane Hamilton in "The Book of Ruth." "Plus he had a kitchen knife he used now and again, when he remembered it in his hand, for detail work." In "The House of Sand and Fog," a husband recounts putting his hands over his wife's "nose and mouth and eyes, this discipline to stand firmly in the face of her struggling, her grasping and twisting and kicking."
There's nothing wrong with creating fictional worlds of misery--Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser turned wasted lives into enduring literature. But a steady diet of melodrama and tragedy only reinforces some peoples' feeling that life doesn't offer much in the way of compensation for its miseries. Surely a book club that influences the reading habits of millions of Americans could open its gates to a wider world, where men aren't always the enemy, women aren't punching bags and children laugh giddily as they sled down a snowy hill.
Ms. Crossen is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
