Apoca-Lit, Oprah, and the End of the World

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Though not a sign of the apocalypse, many were shocked when Oprah Winfrey chose Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the latest selection for her book club. Oprah’s Book Club, perhaps the biggest force in publishing (non British boy wizard division) today, is usually the domain of the uplifting memoir or, more recently, a classic of the past. This time, however, Oprah has chosen one of the bleakest (albeit best-reviewed) novels of the past few years.

In The Road an unnamed man and his son travel across a landscape empty of any comfort or sustenance as they hide from roving bands of cannibals—the only other humans left after the destruction of nearly everything . Not exactly light reading . . . and there is little chance that the notoriously media-shy McCarthy will be appearing on the Oprah show any time soon.

Publishing's leading hitmaker has chosen Cormac McCarthy's "The Road,'' a bleak, apocalyptic novel by an author who rarely talks to the media.

"It is so extraordinary,'' Winfrey said today.”I promise you, you'll be thinking about it long after you finish the final page.''

McCarthy, 73, is known for novels such as "All the Pretty Horses'' and "Blood Meridian,'' and has been widely cited as an heir to William Faulkner for his Biblical prose and rural settings. Critic Harold Bloom, famous for his discerning taste, has called McCarthy one of the greatest living American writers, along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

So what is behind the surprising choice? Does it reflect Oprah’s angry mood following the James Frey debacle? Perhaps, but The LA Time’s Scott Timberg also sees a trend centered on a growing fascination with eschatological themes in literature and film.

They're all recent or upcoming novels with literary heft: Cormac McCarthy's solemn and elegiac "The Road," Chris Adrian's ironic-religious "The Children's Hospital" and Matthew Sharpe's black-humorous "Jamestown," respectively.

It's not just Mel Gibson, Feral House and the "Left Behind" books anymore. Long the province of the paranoid left and Christian right, apocalypse has moved indoors, and it's going highbrow. Literary novels with end-of-the-world settings — these books and others by respected writers such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Tolkin, David Mitchell and Carolyn See — are surging at the same time as serious filmmakers engage a subject most often left to B movies.

Why the sudden high-art obsession with end times? Is it because of our fears after 9/11 and the war in Iraq? Is it even something new? One thing is for sure: with Oprah’s pick, the future is a lot brighter for McCarthy’s publishers than it is for his protagonists.

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