Life After Winfrey?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Successful second acts in literature can be notoriously tricky to pull off under any circumstances. So imagine how hard it is if the first act was performed before a live studio audience, on one of the most watched talk shows in television history, in an unlikely but tremendously successful merging of media: Oprah's Book Club. Once an author wins that literary lottery, can he or she possibly pick the right combination of numbers again?

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 This Much Is True (HarperCollins; 901 pages; $27.50) are unlikely to attain the publicity and sales heights of their predecessors--what could? But readers looking for the qualities Winfrey and her viewers seem to love best--accessible, heartfelt, family-oriented fiction that's easy on the brain--will not be disappointed.

The first time around, Mitchard was a virtual unknown: a Madison, Wis., newspaper columnist and a widowed mother of five. Then she got what has come to be known, for a select group including Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman and, most recently, Edwidge Danticat, as "the call." Says Mitchard, laughing: "It fell under the category of 'Who knew?' I was dumbfounded, honest to gosh." On her follow-up book, the hard part was to exorcise all notions of trying to duplicate the previous success. "The temptation is to just write something like, 'He had a hairy chest, she had big breasts, and everyone got run over by a truck,'" Mitchard says. "You think, people are going to paste me right across the jaw anyway, so why not just get it over with?"

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 the new novel.

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's anxiety," Dorman says. "But that's not the prevailing feeling here right now."

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.

The Most Wanted, for instance, could be a topic on Oprah's show: the book is about Texas Teenagers Who Fall Desperately in Love with Convicts--and it's about childless mothers and motherless children. Dorman has said she and Mitchard raced the clock to get the book into the hands of beach readers. The haste shows. Predictable and melodramatic, The Most Wanted lacks the depth of The Deep End of the Ocean, which was a moving portrait of a family in the aftermath of a child's kidnapping.

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 far.

Let's hope the works' weaknesses are signs merely of writers still finding their way, not a mark of the Curse of Oprah. Given the pressures of publishing, where marketing and the big chains reign supreme, perhaps all that one-hit wonders need is a bit of quiet time.