Yesterday I watched Oprah interview Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t read his books; I started All the Pretty Horses and got bored of it pretty quickly. However, since everyone is going on about how dark The Road is, I was expecting McCarthy to be a grizzled old man straight out of some Hawthorne novel. Instead, he was a sweet, soft-spoken older man who doesn’t seem to care about fame or glory all that much. That baffled Oprah, who apparently has only met writers who want to be on best seller lists. “Boy, you are a different kind of author,” she said at some point.

What I liked the most about the interview was how McCarthy seemed aware that she expected him to act as a role model or moral leader, and wouldn’t take the bait. When she asked him if he was passionate about writing–Oprah seems to think everyone should follow their passions in life–he said, “Passionate is a pretty fancy word for it.” That made me laugh and laugh.

The whole Oprah book club issue is complicated. I am probably more turned off by the elitist crap that comes out every time she picks a book than by anything she does–although I’ll admit that The Secret is pretty nauseating. But people act like she always picks bad books, something I think past picks like Faulkner, Tolstoy, and Toni Morrison would disagree with.

In the end, her book club is our culture’s manifestation of a very old issue–the division between high and low art. And while that is a question that may never be answered, generally speaking, I approve of Oprah’s book club. I like when people promote reading, and very few people do it as successfully as Oprah does.

And anyway, I really like her next pick–Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is an excellent book.