Oprah book club tries to sell Steinbeck
By DOUG GEORGE
Chicago Tribune Oprah Winfrey's book club phenomenon, shelved a year ago shortly after a flap with less-than-grateful author Jonathan Franzen, is back.
(News tip: So is a line of book-club merchandise, emblazoned with the club logo.)
Oprah once again promises to become our nation's Reader Laureate, this time leading us through literary classics of her choosing by authors such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
First on her list is John Steinbeck's East of Eden, a professed favorite.
"It's the perfect book for the summer," Big O gushed. It's like a movie, she said. It's got everything. Love. Betrayal. Sex.
Sex!
So what could be wrong with this? Thousands of readers will come to know a good book they might otherwise not have read. And, of course, East of Eden, a best seller in its day, will come out of the experience no worse for wear.
Maybe nothing is wrong with this. Maybe taking shots at Oprah for "inviting" Steinbeck to her talk show will, in the end, be exposed as just grumpy elitism.
Or maybe something about East of Eden, repackaged in an eye-catching Oprah Edition for the occasion, is in danger of being quietly lost in what could transpire in coming shows.
Gerald Graff, a non-elitist and a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, takes on topics such as literature in popular culture in a new book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (304 pages; Yale University Press; $29.95).
He says he's in favor of Oprah's decision to revive the club:. "Making a classic book available to a wide audience should not be seen as dumbing it down. It's called teaching," Graff says.
On the other hand, intelligent writing such as Steinbeck's ought to be approached intelligently, he says. He gets worried when he sees his own college students read a book, then get stumped when trying to discuss what questions the book raises or when trying to identify cultural debates within the story.
"We need sharper discussions about books," he says. And the level of discourse he sees on Oprah's show at times "could be a lot sharper." Oprah tends to focus on the personal feelings she derives from fiction, he says, and to treat "books as emotional vacations."
Good point.
"It's a page turner," Oprah proclaimed to a studio audience whipped into a frenzy by gift bags of free stuff.
"John Steinbeck, wherever he is in the spirit world, is very happy today," she proclaimed, showing us a previously undemonstrated talent to channel the spirit of the departed author. Apparently a spirit interested in book sales.
If Steinbeck picked that moment to shift in his grave, he'd have missed the her segue into what came next: Look at all the aforementioned book-club merchandise for sale on her Web site.
Caps. Bucket hats. T-shirts. Tote bags.
From there, the East of Eden discussion was mostly about tote bags.
Come on, now. I know some of you out there are Oprahites. Dedalus
