The Oprah Effect

An author friend confides his fondest career wishes: scoring a film deal for his first book, publishing a second by summer - and "getting my book on the Oprah Book Club. That would be . . ."

The ellipsis is appropriate. It's hard to exaggerate the impact that Oprah's Book Club, launched just over a year and a half ago by the grande dame of daytime talk, has had on the book world. Each month, when she recommends a favorite work to her viewers worldwide, they buy and, presumably, read in staggering numbers. All 15 Oprah picks, which range from the quirky (Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone) to the highbrow (Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and, earlier this year, Paradise), have rocketed onto best-seller lists; books that might otherwise not have cracked 100,000 in sales easily sell in the millions. Oprah's Book Club has transformed the publishing monde so quickly and profoundly that the industry has given it a name, as scientists give those celestial phenomena they can predict but can't quite explain: the Oprah effect.

Watching the reader roundtables with authors on Oprah makes it abundantly clear that the Book Club's largest purpose is to humanize books, to pluck them out of the cloistered circles of letters and make them as fundamental to good, lusty living as the crab cakes and biscuits Oprah and company chow down on. At the roundtables with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, dissection of the books wasn't the point: The gatherings functioned as a kind of jury duty, where people of various ethnic backgrounds and stations who would otherwise never give each other a glance were not only talking, but freely sharing long-held secrets, tears, tales of how reading the book shifted their lives monumentally. One woman who described herself in her letter as "Little Miss White Woman" and had resisted reading Angelou had, in the end, the greatest catharsis of anyone.

Oprah's power resides in the intimacy with her audience that she established in her earliest days on television. What is a book club, after all, but a latter-day sewing circle, a reason for a bunch of people to get together and talk? Her unflagging sincerity has taken the notoriously fickle beast of public opinion and focused it on books. More remarkably, she has convinced her cozy circle of millions not simply that books are cool, but literary books are cool, which in a national climate hostile to deep thinking is like convincing a kid to eat peas.

Perhaps the secret of Oprah's success lies in her ability to align worthy ideals with canny marketing. There are those who balk at the fact that she is the world's most influential book critic, that Toni Morrison landed on the mass-culture map not because of her Nobel Prize but because Oprah coronated two of her books. That Morrison might be, at least for a moment, as hot a commodity as a Beanie Baby is an irony, but even the mustiest academic has to admit it's a sweet one. Perhaps because pop-icon status is so often accorded to people of slight or dubious achievement, we become suspicious when achievers like Morrison get what they deserve from us. If a rhapsodic review from Oprah can help to untie that Gordian knot of reasoning, so much the better.

Some would say that Oprah's effusions occasionally border on a kind of intellectual genuflection that pumps up the writers plenty, but doesn't always serve viewers looking to engage in serious literary discussions of the works. When Oprah and a group of readers gathered with Maya Angelou for dinner and chat about club pick The Heart of a Woman, English teacher Yvonne Divans Hutchinson, who watched the show, was put off by the pajama-party atmosphere, in which enraptured guests listened at the feet of the author as she read. Oprah was similarly wide-eyed in her discussion with Morrison. "It wasn't about the book," says Hutchinson, who teaches honors courses at Markham Middle School in Watts. "It was more about adulation than about works of fiction. It was a little syrupy. With Toni, Oprah confessed to a lot of ignorance about the complexity of Paradise, to the point where Toni seemed a bit impatient. Oprah was identifying with the masses who may not have understood, but whether she was playing that up or whether she really didn't understand, I don't know."

There may be some "just folks" orchestration on Oprah's part, but the star has never really been about asking hard questions, at least not on the air. Precisely because she knows hardship - she survived a harrowing childhood, and her defining TV moment came when she admitted to the world in 1985 that she had been sexually abused at the age of 9 - she is primarily a validator, an affirmer of good. It's no surprise, then, that Oprah's Book Club choices tend toward the confessional, the crucible-of-the-female-experience revelational - not sop, but tough, ambitious narratives like those of Morrison, Ursula Hegi or Wally Lamb. Oprah does encourage redemption, though she doesn't pretend that it comes easy. She often cautions her audience against expecting a quick read. Stick with the 500-page Stones From the River, she told them, and the rewards will be many.