Book Clubbing

I wanted to hate it. I thought it would be a big joke, like watching the jocks in school studying for their lit tests. The Oprah Winfrey Book Club? How do I join? But little did I or anyone else know that this was not just another pathetic attempt by the mass media to stretch that weak high culture muscle. This was - is - a phenomenon. A talk show host goes on television and tells her millions of viewers to forget about mothers who steal their daughters' boyfriends. Forget about homosexual husbands. Forget about giant babies. Just for a minute. 'Listen,' she says, 'why not try something really different tonight? Try reading a book.'

And it works. All her viewers dutifully trot down to the local book superstore and buy the novel she's told them to. A few months later, the book goes from literary success to the best-seller list. According to Paul Slovak, vice-president of PR at Viking Penguin, Oprah's first selection - Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean - has leapt from 68,000 copies in print to over a million. There have been four more books in the Oprah Winfrey Club since then, all of them becoming best-sellers. Oprah now wields enormous power over the publishing world as editors scheme to get their books on her list. She demands that publishers donate her choices to libraries by the tens of thousands (they do). She also gets them to reissue her friend Toni Morrison's book, Song of Solomon, in a new hard cover edition, repriced from $26 to $18.95 after some her viewers complained that the books were too expensive. As Ira Silverberg, now Editor-in-Chief at Grove Press, says, 'Everyone in publishing is obsessed with Oprah now'.

How does it work? Step one: You become a member. Around the 18th of every month, Oprah announces her 'new' book. You buy it. You read it. It's been a long time. You haven't read anything since high school. You love the book. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. Meeting the author would be your lifelong dream.

Step two: You write a letter to Oprah. (The address is on the screen.) You tell her how the book made you relive the most cathartic moments in your life. And, if you're incredibly lucky, you make the grade. Oprah responds to your letter.

Step three: You get invited to dinner. You love Jacquelyn Mitchard/Toni Morrison/Jane Hamilton/Wally Lamb...'s work. So much so that you - along with the three or four other lucky winners - allow stage make-up to be applied heavily to your face before having dinner with one of these writers. You get to see your deeply intimate letter enlarged and televised, so that not only your bad penmanship is exposed, but also your own writing style as Oprah reads choice bits aloud. Finally, after nervous conversation over drinks in an opulent sitting room, the author arrives and dinner begins.

This dinner is a lavish affair with no regard for the Zone, Donna Karan's juice diet or Macrobiotics. You and Oprah stuff yourselves with four or five courses that include Cornish game hen and pear and pistachio tart. You eat from extravagant china purchased especially for the occasion. And while you eat, without chewing too much so your face looks funny, the writer reads her book to you. It's just like being four again. And, just like a child, you can't help bursting into tears at the sad parts. Except that now you're an adult woman and you're at a table bonding with a group of other women and, of course, they're all sobbing, too. Including Oprah. And then the author gets up, as gracefully as a guru. She rises from her seat and floats around the table to your chair, laying on her hands, touching your shoulder until your tears subside. No one's make-up runs. The healing power of words.

Almost as soon as it's started, it's finished. You leave, reluctantly, a surge of emotion pouring out toward the other guests. Like a group of disaster victims or Outward Bound survivors. Books are so great. You had no idea. You're going to tell all your friends that reading that book will change their lives. Everyone saw it themselves on the Lifetime Special. The author has saved your soul. Or was it Oprah?

Patrick McGrath, whose current novel Asylum is doing very well despite not making the club, says, 'I like to think it'll have a trickle down effect. That more people will read books, generally. More people will visit bookstores, generally. I suspect that it will change the reading habits of a lot of people. The downside is that Oprah becomes the Great Arbitrator of Books and readers who might have wandered your way, don't, because she hasn't told them to'. America is reading, just as Oprah proclaimed she would have them do when she started her club, back on that fateful day in September. Indeed, Oprah is currently the single most powerful woman in publishing today. The media, from C-Span to the New York Times, have only good things to say. Americans are reading 'literature', books that are 'better than airport fare', says Patrick McGrath. Toni Morrison did win a Nobel Prize, after all. And don't book sales in one area increase publishing revenues and therefore increase book publishing in all areas?

Well, yes and no. As Ira Silverberg says, 'What she's doing is fuelling the Big Book trend in publishing. The publishers are putting all their efforts into one Big Book that's going to sell millions of copies. So there's this megabook, but no one has time for any of the little books. So, everyone in publishing is happy about the Oprah effect, but it's a mixed blessing. And didn't Oprah option one of Toni's books?'

She certainly did. While Oprah makes her decision independently - there are rumour of warehouses of books sent to her by publishers that remain unread - she does want to see Song of Solomon become a movie. It will probably help if three-quarters of the American public have read the book before it hits the cinema. On her America Online website she defends herself by telling people it's a great book anyway, and that was why she optioned it. You can discuss it in her chat room, if you can ever get onto America Online. She does stand to gain slightly more than an ethereal entrée to the world of high literature.

Her investment in Morrison aside, she or her producers have done their research well. Reading is back, and the New York Times Book Review has called reading groups 'one of the phenomena of the 90s'. Oprah's ratings have soared. Every other bookstore, from the megastores to the Strand, has a special section, The Oprah Book Club. Her celebrity has quadrupled. Oprah was already famous enough to have lost her surname, but now she has crossed over. Last month, Oprah was given 'The Person of the Year' award at the LMP Awards for Excellence in Book Publishing. 'Everyone watches Oprah now', says Ira Silverberg. 'It used to be Good Morning, America or E! But now, it's Oprah. And I haven't read The Deep End of the Ocean, but I hear it's really quite good'.

'The Book of Ruth, I haven't read it myself, but I hear it's terrific', says Patrick McGrath. Who has read them? Everyone else, obviously. If you want to get started, the next book is Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi. It's about a dwarf librarian living in war time Germany. Not what one would necessarily consider a prime choice. Then again, look at the covers of the tabloids.

It's the mass media approach to culture. It's got a number of questionable consequences. But do I hate it? No, not really. Somewhere inside, I like the idea of authors being worshipped. I like more intelligent books getting attention and selling better than Deepak Chopra. I have to admit that I like the over-the-top tasteless glitter as much as I laugh at it. I like seeing everyday people moved by strong writing. It all has the makings of a trend I'd love to see catch on. Maybe I have the tiniest hope that one day, maybe even for my next book, she'll pick me.