410 PAGES

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | Any reader who has ever had a childhood love for reading burned out of her by the sacred fire of a literary education will find much to admire in Janice Radway's exhaustive study of the Book-of-the-Month Club. A professor at Duke University and one of the leading figures in the field of cultural studies (primarily meaning the analysis of previously spurned, non-elite areas of culture), Radway neither wants to praise the Club nor bury it. She convincingly argues that the Club's oft-derided packaging and selling of capital-L literature to middle-class strivers made it, for good and ill, one of the defining institutions of American middlebrow culture. Further, she sees that the Club's often contradictory ideology -- which simultaneously presented books as realms of utilitarian, technocratic discourse (coded male) and intensely absorbing, transformative pleasure (coded female) -- offered its consumers opportunities for liberation as well as constriction.

While Radway's account of her year of behind-the-scenes fieldwork at the Club's Manhattan offices in the turbulent mid-'80s will be fascinating to anyone engaged with the publishing world, the most compelling aspect of her book is its autobiographical narrative. Through the course of her research, Radway comes to see the connection between the teenage girl she used to be, avidly devouring "Kon-Tiki" and "Marjorie Morningstar" (both Club selections from the '50s), and the licensed literary academic she has become, secretly and guiltily preferring Anne Tyler and John le Carré to Faulkner or Pynchon. For all the force of her critique of the sexism, racism and bourgeois narrow-mindedness reflected in the Club's selections, Radway nonetheless "comes out" as a middlebrow reader herself, shaped by the Club's irresistible ethic and aesthetic, addicted to the "tactile, sensuous, profoundly emotional experience of being captured by a book ... an experience that for all its ethereality clearly is extraordinarily physical as well."

Given that, it's somewhat surprising that the lengthy middle section of "A Feeling for Books," which explores in detail the historical and cultural context surrounding entrepreneur Harry Scherman's 1926 founding of the Club, is so bone-dry. Radway has poured an immense amount of research and analytical effort into this section, but while her conclusions are often striking, her prose is leaden with academic jargon and seems (to the lay reader) needlessly repetitive. I came away wishing she could have published two versions of this book -- one for academic colleagues who will parse every footnote, and another for the very Book-of-the-Month readers with whom she identifies, however ambivalently.

There are a number of other lapses that weaken this commendable work. While she admits to the ultimate inexplicability of taste, Radway does not consider that other readers may find the same transportative delight in "Ulysses" or "The Waste Land" that she discovers in "The Thorn Birds." Nor does she delineate the personal distinction she appears to draw between readerly, pleasurable texts and writerly, intellectual ones. Where would she classify Dickens? George Eliot? Proust? Finally, her evocation of a literary oligarchy still devoted to the church of high modernism seems curiously outdated. Can Radway possibly be unaware of the extent to which she and her cultural studies colleagues -- in bringing rock, romances and slasher films into the groves of academe -- have helped inaugurate a new intellectual era?
SALON | Nov. 14, 1997

Andrew O'Hehir is a New York writer and a frequent contributor to Salon.