Mystery: Not the Book, the Category

The Haberman column
It’s such a good column that I copied and pasted it here:
Mystery: Not the Book, the Category

By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 31, 2006

OVERHEARD the other day in the Barnes & Noble store on Broadway in the 80’s:

James Frey’s best-selling book, “A Million Little Pieces,” displayed in a New York City bookstore earlier this month.

“It’s a terrific book,” a woman says to two other women browsing at tables near the entrance.

“Yeah, I just started it,” one of the two women responds.

“I read it before all this,” the first woman says. “But it’s still terrific.”

In case you haven’t already figured it out, they were talking about “A Million Little Pieces,” James Frey’s tale of drug addiction and redemption, which has thrown New York’s publishing world — and, more significantly, Oprah Winfrey — into the wildest tizzy since Angelina and Brad found bliss together.

If the overheard conversation is at all a guide, Mr. Frey may enjoy continued loyalty from readers unfazed by the revelations that his “memoir” is about as fact-based as “Nanny McPhee.”

The Frey-stirred debate seems more focused now on how properly to classify the book. Should newspaper best-seller lists, for instance, remove it from the Nonfiction category and put in Fiction?

Barnes & Noble, New York’s book omnivore, has already cast its own important vote. Don’t go searching on shelves marked Fiction for either “A Million Little Pieces” or its now equally suspect follow-up, “My Friend Leonard.”

“Leonard” is to be found, at the Upper West Side store anyway, under the heading Nonfiction Best Sellers. Barnes & Noble passed on perhaps putting it on a nearby table bearing a sign that is more neutral and beyond dispute: In the News.

As for “Pieces,” you might think it would make sense to try the section marked Addiction/Recovery. Don’t bother. Head instead to, of all places, Biography. Mr. Frey lurks there in hardcover. Blessed by alphabetical happenstance, he basks one shelf below volumes on Benjamin Franklin and alongside a book on Sigmund Freud. (What indeed, you cannot but wonder, would Freud have made of this whole affair?)

B & N seems a bit more tentative about “Pieces” at its Chelsea store, on Avenue of the Americas in the 20’s. There, the paperback edition sits in Lives and Letters, a somewhat ambiguous category, lacking the factual certainty that Biography would seem to suggest.

(Note to copy desk: Please be careful that the V doesn’t somehow fall out of the word “lives.”)

Leaving aside Mr. Frey’s just deserts, the shelves of New York’s bookselling giant can get a person pondering what they may say about the city and some of its neighborhoods.

Take my own part of town, the Upper West Side. What is one to make of the fact that a vast stretch of wall — 76 shelves in all — is devoted to Self-Improvement? This does not include another 70 shelves given to Psychotherapy and Psychology.

Are West Siders in such bad shape that they need so many books on how to become better human beings?

Not far from Self-Improvement, there are 23 New Age shelves, right by 7 shelves on Wicca, including the inevitable “Witches and Witchcraft for Dummies.” How much do you want to bet that all those books on display, in the very neighborhood where “Rosemary’s Baby” was set, will be seen by the likes of Pat Robertson as evidence of our godless ways?

BUT is old-time religion really dead?

Hardly. Not if there is meaning to the 97 shelves on Christianity and Christian Inspiration. Or to the 48 Judaica shelves. Six of the 48, it might be noted, are labeled Holocaust Studies. They raise a separate question of whether Barnes & Noble believes that the Holocaust is of interest solely to Jews rather than being a historic calamity worthy of everyone’s attention.

Of course, one might be well advised not to make too much of a bookstore’s judgments. Do 17 Buddhism shelves, compared with only 7 for Islam, reflect New York’s demographic realities? Probably no more than do 25 African-American shelves and a mere 6 Hispanic shelves for a city where Latinos outnumber blacks.

Certainly, the women overheard praising Mr. Frey seemed uninfluenced by possibly meaningless categories.

By the way, the woman who had finished “A Million Little Pieces” told the others that for a real treat they should try “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth. Part of that book is about a disengaged president and the erosion of civil liberties. You can look for it under Fiction.

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