Word: lamb
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Readers can now decide for themselves. Nearly two years ago, to inaugurate her now famous book club, Oprah Winfrey sent viewers swarming to buy Jacquelyn Mitchard's well-reviewed first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean; four months later, a five-year-old book by Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone, was anointed. Now, with nearly 3 million copies of each book in print, both authors are nervously sending their second novels out into the world. Unless Winfrey gives the writers another on-air boost, Mitchard's The Most Wanted (Viking; 407 pages; $24.95) and Lamb's I Know...
...Lamb, who teaches writing at the University of Connecticut, was already more than halfway through I Know This Much Is True when She's Come Undone was rediscovered. Even so, his life as a solitary writer was tossed upside down. "When Oprah came tapping at the biosphere door, it was a kick," he says, "but I sort of had to take a hiatus for a couple of months." At the peak of Oprah fever, Lamb was getting about 75 letters a month from readers, and he had to rent a telephone-free office across town in order to finish...
Though the cash windfall was nice, both authors downplay the sudden change in their fortunes. Lamb and his wife, a high school teacher, are giving a lot of their newfound wealth away, while Mitchard was relieved merely to be able to pay some bills. Oprah has copies of their new books, but Lamb and Mitchard say they have no expectations that the star will pick them again. And it hardly matters. According to Pamela Dorman, Mitchard's editor, the author already has such an enthusiastic following that Viking has printed 400,000 copies of the new title. "Of course there...
That is because, as with products bearing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, readers already know what they'll be getting with an Oprah book. Says Lamb: "They're all about people trying to connect out of their alienation." They are also usually intimate stories, painted on canvases the size of TV screens, with only occasional attempts by the authors to grapple with the grander forces of history or politics...
...Lamb's new book is also a departure from She's Come Undone, an offbeat story of an overweight girl named Dolores. Ambitious and sprawling, I Know This Much Is True is a monster of a tale about twin brothers, one schizophrenic and one healthy, that covers a Forrest Gump-like time span and touches on issues ranging from Native American rights to child pornography. Lamb's ending is a triumph of simple beauty; unfortunately, many readers simply will not get that...