Aug 28 2008
Oprah and Me
In the beginning, there was the Oprah Book Club, and it was good. Depressing, mostly. But good. Then a pattern emerged. If you followed the book selections faithfully, you know what I mean. For a while there, it was Oprah therapy. All the books were about lost and abused children. Maybe not all, but a lot. After awhile, I had to bail out. Quality writing or not, the stories all began to run together after a time. I tried reading other books in between, but the heavy sadness never seemed to have time to dissipate. I’m sure I missed out on some great authors, although I did revisit the Book Club for titles I knew to be more diverse in subject matter. This all came back to me this week when I was given a book to read, an Oprah selection, as it turned out, that took me right back down that road, a rural Kentucky road this time, and into the sad, lonely, and difficult life of a young girl named Icy Sparks.
Icy, for whom the novel by Gwyn Hyman Rubio is named, has what we now recognize as Tourette Syndrome. I don’t know much about it, but hers lies dormant for much of the time, seemingly triggered by extreme stress or emotion. In her tiny mountain community, she is labeled a freak, isolated even by the people who care about her, and misunderstood to the extent of being locked up in a mental institution. She is eventually sent home again, but without any evidence of having been treated. Icy perseveres with her studies and her relationships, and eventually finds some spiritual comfort as well, but it seems as though she continues to exist regardless, not necessarily buoyed by anything that happens along the way. Sometimes people survive, the story seems to say, even when they don’t seem to have a reason.
Parts of the story seem vague and underdeveloped, and the epilogue is jarring: apparently Icy went to college, found out she had Tourette’s and went on to “embrace her difference.” But the story is moving and atmospheric, the characters well-drawn. I still have a hard time with cruelty to children, and was glad when it was over, so there is definitely a personal bias at work here where subject matter is concerned. Even so, it isn’t a stand-out among the Oprah favorites, good though it may be.
And one more word on the Oprah Book Club. I don’t miss the psychoanalytic selections of the early days, it’s true, and I know there were a couple of dust-ups over books like The Corrections and the Frey book, but her decision to use her Book Club to promote best sellers of the past is a real disappointment to me. Those books, those authors, have had their day, their money, their tour. There are so many amazing voices clamoring to be heard. Maybe she could send her best friend out looking for the country’s best writers, rather than the country’s best burgers…
