Celebrity book clubs are booming – but their smug, bland lists are bad for literature

The novel becoming a cultural accessory means to look like a reader, not be one.

It started with Oprah, as many things do. In 1996 America’s most beloved talk show host launched her “book club” on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each month a new novel was selected by Oprah, beamed into the homes of millions, and in many cases forever altered the fortunes of the writer. After a 2007 plug, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road saw an increase in sales to the tune of a million copies; when she chose Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it enjoyed a sales bump in the region of 800,000. Morrison had already won the Nobel Prize seven years prior.

Not everyone was satisfied with the deus ex machina of the Oprah endorsement. In 2001 Jonathan Franzen was troubled by The Corrections’ appearance on the feted list. Oprah may have picked some good books, he conceded, “but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe”. It’s hard to imagine such truculence these days from authors, who are subject to the whims of the celebrity endorsement more than ever. Winfrey may have been first, but in recent years Emma Watson, Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon are among a slew of stars who have produced their own iteration. Cindy Crawford’s photogenic daughter Kaia Gerber recommends her millions of followers a Plato dialogue, a book by the Californian writer and artist Eve Babitz, a 1965 semi-autobiographical French novel by Albertine Sarrazin. If the highbrow still has no place in the clasp of an A-lister, then someone should alert 2001 Franzen to this young woman immediately.

No better is this trend evidenced than by Britain’s own Lipa. The singer, on the brink of becoming pop royalty, was guest speaker at the Booker Prize’s 2022 awards ceremony. Earlier that year she launched a newsletter, Service95, where members read along with the monthly pick: the classic young adult novel Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman; Orwell Prize-winning Say Nothing by the New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden-Keefe – a non-fiction investigation about the Troubles in Northern Ireland (declared “a masterclass” in the genre by the pop star); One Hundred Years of Solitude had Lipa reflecting on “the many meanings of solitude” (naturally!).

Lipa, like Gerber and those with similar projects have made an obvious calculation: their mass appeal (a subject area they are genuine experts in) is helped by veering towards the abstract and intellectual. Lipa, in particular, has decided that the populism of her music – with its easy-to-digest hooks and unchallenging lyrics – is not anathema to the display of her own literary taste (naive in places, though it may be). In fact, they seem perfectly complementary.

There have always been accessories necessary for anyone who aspires to the ineffable quality of cool: an insouciant disposition, a cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of their mouth and an outfit that manages to tread the fine line between timeless and zeitgeisty. But now more important than ever is a well-thumbed copy of Sally Rooney’s latest novel Intermezzo, or perhaps – as the supermodel Gigi Hadid was spotted with at fashion week a few years ago – Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

Those at the commanding heights of celebrity are now no longer satisfied with the limitations of designer clothes and Glastonbury sets (yawn!) but reach for the novel in search of an intellectual credibility otherwise denied to them. In George Eliot’s prescient – if rather nasty – 1856 essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” she despairs at the typical (and, in her mind, implausible) heroine of a romance novel: a girl “perfectly well dressed” and with “superb intellect.” Eliot might be surprised (and appalled) to learn that in the intervening centuries this heroine has escaped the inky page and become physically incarnate: witness the Verso pamphlet tucked neatly under the arm of a starlet on the streets of London, not just as proof of her superb intellect but as a requisite condition for being perfectly well dressed, too.

But it is the married, Alan Partridge-esque TV hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan who are the true literary power brokers of Great Britain. Despite now existing online and off-air, their club – more likely to recommend something you’ll see described as “gasp out-loud twisty” or a “stylish sun-soaked thriller” on its blurb – is responsible for repeatedly propelling titles up the bestseller list.

Unsurprisingly given the liberal tenor of today’s publishing industry, there is a progressive hum to most book club recommendations. These lists come with scant reference to the sharp edges of Michel Houellebecq, the dissolute female characters of Ernest Hemingway or the vitriol of Philip Roth. Instead Dakota Johnson typifies the disposition while describing the selection strategy for her own club: “It’s not all female authors, but it is female-forward.”

I am with Franzen: for all the worthy choices, shmaltz remains the celebrity book club’s defining mode. The loyal acolytes of these new literary tastemakers are too often absolved from the hard work required for the less palatable, more challenging texts. And the result is the perpetuation of a literary realm captured by the demands of contemporary mores, masquerading as timeless and profound.

But what did we expect? When we turned the novel into a cultural accessory, it became a means to demonstrate an intellectual hinterland without having to try; to look like a reader without actually having to be one. The populist rise of the celebrity book club might be proof of the novel’s mass appeal – but like all populist movements, its foundations are shallow.