THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader The Day the Book Club Died Book sales are down everywhere, review sections in newspapers across the nation are being trimmed, popular fiction hasn't met serious fiction for so...
...Facing his close call in a way natural to such a prolific thinker and writer, he compiled a journal of reflections about a life unexpectedly given a renewed lease...
...Some of it is very good, but none of it assumes the huge burden of complete social explanation that we once expected the novel to bear...
...Novel reading was always—culturally speaking—an acquired taste...
...It has become harder and harder," Oprah confided last week as she announced the shutting down of her project to sell America on her new favorites, "to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share...
...It was not, however, a life spared, exactly: As Neuhaus reminds us, we are all dying and have already set out on the final journey whether we like it or not...
...The long months following found him battling the painful and debilitating effects of the several surgeries—one of them botched—that eventually brought him out of danger...
...Recovery was slow, and Neuhaus had time to think about what had befallen him...
...Emerging from the darkness, Neuhaus has produced an aching yet comforting account of one soul's struggle with the somber destiny that necessarily awaits all...
...In certain ways, this book is a confession...
...Neuhaus writes freely of the fears and humiliations he endured during his crisis and convalescence, admitting to dire thoughts of death he had yet to confront, despite a lifetime ministering to others at death's door...
...Mystery novels, of course...
...Sometime in the mid-1990s, an unsuspected abdominal tumor ruptured and almost killed him...
...Richard John Neuhaus—a Roman Catholic priest in the archdiocese of New York, author of such books as The Naked Public Square, and editor of the journal First Things—calls his small, personal, and potent book a set of "meditations upon returning...
...This book is at once intimate and dispassionate, wrestling courageously with the irreducibles of time and eternity...
...Tracy Lee Simmons...
...But if the new ones aren't even reaching a level sufficient for Oprah's Book Club, then what remains...
...Bottum Books in Brief Only the confident would dare to share a book title with the winner of a Nobel Prize for literature, but this offering carries a Faulknerian gravity...
...There is no dearth of such books still being published...
...As I Lay Dying is written for those who, like the lonely spirits in one of T.S...
...That last fact may actually offer the deepest commentary on the state of American writing...
...I'm speechless with regret and disappointment," one New York publicist told Publishers Weekly—as well he might be, for the one thing Oprah's Book Club always did was sell books...
...But, the truth is, the writing she used to feel compelled to share was never what anyone would call great fiction...
...As David Skinner put it in The Weekly Standard back in the summer of 2000, "Oprah's Book Club is enamored almost exclusively of a literary world where the women are innocent, the men are brutal, and if you watch the river long enough, the body of your husband will float by...
...Returning from death, that is...
...Thrillers, science fiction, westerns, romances, and all the rest of genre fiction...
...And that bellwether Oprah Winfrey may have spotted that it's going the way of madrigal singing and morris dancing...
...But this is also a philosophical and, ultimately, a theological inquiry into the nature of death and dying, straining always for the meeting place of intellect and experience...
...Eliot's plays, walk through the world "living, living, and partly living," which is perhaps each one of us...
...The Standard Reader The Day the Book Club Died Book sales are down everywhere, review sections in newspapers across the nation are being trimmed, popular fiction hasn't met serious fiction for so long they might as well be on different planets—and now Oprah Winfrey's book club is no more...
...Art forms don't last forever...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 30
