Fellow bibliophiles, we blew it.
We thought we knew why Oprah Winfrey was a cultural hero. We were sure we understood why she deserved the eternal gratitude of book lovers, the constant bouquets of praise from teachers, scholars, anyone who cares about the life of the mind.
It was her book club.
Wasn’t it?
Alas, no. Turns out that what really distinguished Winfrey, what lifted her from your regular, garden-variety, gazillionaire TV talk show host to a figure of profound cultural significance wasn’t just the book club.
It was the fact that the book club — the original one, the one that ran from 1996 to 2002 — put middle-brow literature on the map.
This realization came suddenly last week, when Winfrey chose for her summer reading list three novels by the decidedly un-middlebrow William Faulkner: “As I Lay Dying,” “Light in August” and “The Sound and the Fury.”
In the old book club, Winfrey typically picked a satisfyingly middlebrow book by a living author. A book by, say, Anita Shreve, Alice Hoffman or Bret Lott. A book you looked forward to reading, a book you couldn’t wait to finish so that you could press it into a friend’s palm with a whispered, “You’re just gonna love this.”
And then, apparently frustrated by controversies over her selections, Winfrey dumped the original book club. In 2003, she reconstituted it as a “classics” book club, selecting such weighty tomes as John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” and Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” Faulkner’s works — the reading of which can be as frustrating and perilous as driving through a thick fog at daybreak — will fit nicely into what critic David Denby has called “a list of heavyweight names … like the marble busts in some imaginary pantheon of glory.” Faulkner, without question, is among the greats.
But what about the not-so-greats?
Not on the syllabus
What about that vast middle range of books, books that aren’t destined to end up on the syllabi of graduate-level courses at elite universities, books that don’t aspire to redefine the human condition, that don’t elevate the soul, that raise no gnarled fist to rage against the dark dominion of destiny?
What about books that just feature a nice story and some fetching characters?
The great unsung glory of Winfrey’s original book club was its celebration of middlebrow literature, of authors such as Sue Miller, Wally Lamb and Maeve Binchy. “Middlebrow” is a vague term, an imprecise one, but most people have an instinctive understanding of its meaning: Books that are written to be read, books for which you grieve if you inadvertently leave them behind on your way out the door.
No one in the history of the world, I’ll wager, ever said, “Darn it! I left `The Brothers Karamazov’ on the hall table.”
Middlebrow literature had no better friend than Winfrey, whose exquisite taste gave her a knack for finding worthy books — mostly but not always fiction — that, without her imprimatur, might have slipped through the cracks.
The classics? You’re worried about missing the classics? The classics have no shortage of earnest advocates. You can find lengthy reading lists of classic literature posted in libraries, classrooms, bookstores, on a wide variety of Web sites.
And who, pray tell, ever needs to be reminded about the value of the classics? We’re all painfully aware that we ought to read (or re-read) “Middlemarch” or “Crime and Punishment” or “To the Lighthouse.” We don’t need Winfrey to tell us we ought to brush up on our Marcel Proust, that we need more Henry James in our lives. That kind of castor-oil advice is available everywhere.
What’s not available everywhere, however, are advocates for the middlebrow. The sensible center, as politicians like to call it. Not junk, not trash — but not deathless, soaring, radiant prose, either.
Something in the middle.
In art, music too
Literature isn’t the only field in which the middlebrow is continually aced out by the heavyweights at the margins, by the strong pull of the top or the bottom. Visual artists such as Norman Rockwell long were scorned because they were deemed too amiable, too predictable in ordinary ways. In music, a middle-of-the-road performer such as Norah Jones is ridiculed because she’s popular and accessible. These artists, many critics complain, break no new ground, unearth no sharp new truths. But is innovation the only measure of an art’s worthiness? Must something be unprecedented to have value? Too often, the middlebrow is mistakenly confused with the mediocre.
If Winfrey wanted to switch to classics by authors safely dead, authors who couldn’t perversely complain — as Jonathan Franzen did — about their selection by her original book club — why didn’t she go for great middlebrow works of the past? Why head straight for the glass-fronted bookshelf of exalted, constantly anthologized authors, most of whose works have never gone out of print?
Why not pick writers such as Edna Ferber, William Dean Howells, Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara or Booth Tarkington, popular in their lifetimes but virtually unknown to many of today’s readers?
Before I am pelted with snooty e-mails calling me a lowbrow philistine or — what’s worse — implying that I’m actually a highbrow snob because I don’t think the classics are for everyone, let me stipulate that classic literature is for everyone. I’m not arguing that Faulkner isn’t worth the trouble of figuring him out; I’m saying that he doesn’t need Winfrey to help him draw a crowd. Everybody acknowledges that Faulker is important. But who’s beating the drum for Sarah Waters or Ron Hansen, two contemporary middlebrow authors who deserve much larger readerships?
Engaging with classic authors
In Denby’s remarkable book “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World” (Simon & Schuster, 1996), he beautifully describes the experience of engaging with classic authors such as Dante and Plato. Reading “The Iliad,” Denby recounts, was “like fronting a stream that refuses to slacken or die.” It’s a work that is “challenging and even subversive of almost anyone’s peace.” But sometimes you don’t want to be challenged; sometimes you’ll just take the peace, thanks very much. And that’s where middlebrow literature comes into the picture.
In “Swann” (1987), a novel by the late Carol Shields, the Oak Park native and great middlebrow author, a character puts it this way: “Whenever I meet anyone, I don’t say, `Tell me about your belief system.’ I say, `Tell me about your average day.'”
And that’s the essence of middlebrow literature: average days. Ordinary insights. There’s a beauty in the in-between, a grace and serenity in middle ground.
Sadly, Winfrey is missing the chance to tell her viewers about great practicing middlebrow authors such as Patrick McGrath, Alan Furst, Ron Hansen, Anita Brookner and Dennis Lehane.
Some of those authors already have garnered large and devoted audiences. But others could use a bit of a boost from Winfrey. And they won’t get it, because she’s too busy touting Faulkner — instead of authors whose works glow in the glorious, sometimes overlooked and definitely misunderstood middle. Works that connect rather than challenge. Works that entertain.
Such works may not be for the ages — but they’re perfect for the bus ride home.
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jikeller@tribune.com
