Oprah redux

Six months ago, a group of authors wrote television personality Oprah Winfrey pleading with her to resume featuring living authors on her "book club" of the air, which from 1996 to 2002 spurred sales of middle-aged-female-friendly fiction. Last month Winfrey relented, announcing that her presentations of living authors would resume. But she threw a curve: her first selection was not a novel, but a memoir of addiction, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which today a Salon writer took pains to object to.

This whole brouhaha over what Oprah Winfrey decides to talk about on her TV show really amuses me. Not that she wants to talk about books with her audience -- God love her. But it's that so many other people feel it's their duty to advise her on what she should do. Look, I'm sure lots of people do watch Winfrey's show, and a lot of them did buy the books she recommended, and many of them probably even read them. And if they gained some appreciation for modern literature and became finer human beings because of it, fine -- though I'm not sure they really did. (Are these the same people who go apeshit when she gives away cars? Did the utterly hysterical reaction -- as rebroadcast on news shows that week -- of those receiving the cars suggest they had, over the course of several years of reading modern literature suggested by Winfrey, somehow deepened their understanding of the human condition and become finer people? And if so, how would the reaction of people who hadn't spent years in the Oprah Book Club be different -- would they be more hysterical? Less so?)

But I have the feeling that this is not so much about about... how did those hundred authors put it... "inviting all readers into the community of literature." It's not even about the divide between literary and popular fiction and the "type" of people who read each (or both), as most commentators suggested.

It's about two things: First, money. Getting Oprah's recommendation for your book was considered a life-changing moment for authors; it was better than getting a MacArthur grant, which after all is just a monetary prize and an honor, whereas an Oprah endorsement translates into real sales. In fact, I'll bet there are savvy authors who, if they were given the choice between getting a Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah Book Club pick, would seriously consider the latter, because there are simply more people who will buy their book because of it.

And the second thing I think this is really about is a real apprehension about the commercialization and McDonaldsization of culture, a reluctance to see everything branded and marketed and cross-promoted and stamped with a logo. The idea that it is actually possible that there are some things in life that don't benefit from being commercialized and corporatized. It probably doesn't make sense to try to fight that battle for books, whether they're regarded as difficult or "literary" or as commercial and dumb, because all books today are, let's face it, commodities. Even Dave Eggers, who publishes his own books now and makes a virtue out of being quirky and different, even his books are commodities. And you can't draw a magic circle around some and say these are special and mustn't be sullied.

But there must be something in this culture that you can make a stand on.

Previously: Authors beg Oprah to restart 'Book Club'
Salon's Laura Miller on the Jonathan Franzen controversy
USA Today: Franzen regrets brouhaha

Oh, and by the way, about those cars: the lucky recipients had to pay tax on them, of course -- up to $7000.