Shuffle through the last controversy of Oprah’s Book Controvery, the fictional Holocaust Survior Memoir — partially defendedor at least explained here by one Ken Waltzer (controverisal as this will inevitably be) and given a ripping by one Ted Rall here.

Oprah narrowly dodged a bullet with another of her picks, the maudlin 1997 Holocaust memoir Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca. This purported tale of a young Jewish girl who travels through Europe in search of her parents before being adopted by a pack of wolves, a la Romulus and Remus, turned out to be less than authentic. Quelle surprise.

The “Feral Child” part was what gave it away.

The matter with James Frey is a bit easier to explain: dime a dozen junkie experience writes elaborate fiction which would sell less as fiction than as memoir.

The matter with Oprah’s Book Club is the matter with what she is drawn to, which encourage this.  Tell me if this book sounds interesting:

The Hour I First Believed opens in Littleton, Colo., on the eve of the shootings at Columbine High […]   Lamb invokes a relentless flow of tragedy, from Columbine to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina to Iraq, a hit-and-run, drug addiction, homelessness, kidnappings, lawsuits. Every environmental, political and psychosocial horror the United States has endured in the past decade, as well as every terror that sits salivating at the edge of a human life, is visited upon Caelum Quirk. It isn’t long before the book starts to feel like a horror flick at a summer drive-in, where the entertainment lies in trying to figure out what monster will leap out of the bushes next. It doesn’t make me cringe. It doesn’t make me ponder the effects of collateral damage. It makes me think of Dorothy Parker’s line every time she heard the doorbell ring: “Oh, what fresh hell is this?”

The author of two Oprah Book Club books tried a grab-bag of relentless prodding at all of the current day historic calamities burying about our cultural pscyes?  Okay, so it’s a touchy-feely universe Oprah inhabits — one that apparently encourages Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in picking at all available scabs – but Is This Art? Reviews suggest that this book is too long — that it’s too bad Oprah bestowed the honor of propping him up because now editors have less latitude to cut down his novel– to which my suggestion would be to simply rip out one tragedy and have a maximum real world big event limit of three.

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