I guess I should join Oprah’s Book Club: Praise for Uwem Akpan’s “Say You’re One of Them”

Two days after I finished Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, Oprah Winfrey selected this collection of short stories as part of her popular book club.  As a reader, I personally hate to have my literary consumption tattooed with giant “O”s on the cover but I generally support the arguably most influential woman in modern history’s attempt to get people to read good books.  Akpan joins the rest of Winfrey’s literati entourage: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, and Toni Morrison to name a few.

I’m curious to how Winfrey’s devotees, usually middle class women, will react to possibly the most violent, morally-challenging books I have ever read.  In fact, whether you read Say You’re One of Them on lazy Sunday mornings, on your lunch breaks, or a few minutes before bed time, I should warn the prospective reader that there is no “good” time to read Akpan’s horrific tales.

Prior to reading Say You’re One of Them, I considered Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle the most violent, though poignant, social commentary I have read.  It also contained, in my opinion the worst literary death, in which a minor character, young Stanislovas, falls asleep from exhaustion and malnutrition after hours at his place of illegal employment and is eaten alive by rats.  Please let me know of a worse literary fate. Akpan’s protagnists, all of which are children, now vie for this terrible distinction as they face an adult world of ethnic and religious violence, rape, prostitution, drug use, AIDS, poverty, and hunger.

When Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner first debuted, I was in the awkward position of hating a novel that everyone and their grandma adored.  To say you hated The Kite Runner in 2003-2004 was akin to declaring you considered drowning kittens as a hobby.  I still maintain that Hosseini’s prose and structure are amateurish at best and the novel simply capitalizes on a contemporary event. Whether, intentional or unintentional, the popularity of The Kite Runner among Americans is in part due to its complicity with the American invasion of Afghanistan.  I worried similarly that Akpan’s work would suffer the same trappings.  It does not.  Akpan is a talented writer and one I hope to follow as I age.