Oprah champions post-apocalyptic cannibalism!

Remember the good old days, when Oprah’s Book Club chose lightweight books filled with feel-good bromides and/or uplifting female self-empowerment? And then, she got all arty and picked Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” which sort of appalled the author and forced Oprah to withdraw it as a choice for her fans and even, for a time, suspend her book club altogether?

Even though Oprah declared “The Corrections” “the best 648 pages I've read in years,” Franzen scarcely considered the endorsement a positive development in his career. When I spoke to him at the time, he fretted that were a serious reader of literary fiction to see the Oprah sticker of approval on a book, “You wouldn't read it. Exactly! You'd think it's going to be some schmaltzoid, one-dimensional issues book.” He added that post-Oprah, “The book got split in two in some modern-physics-type way. One is going on its trajectory, without the corporate logo and finding its way to folks who shop in independent bookstores, and version two is finding its way into Wal-Marts and Costcos.”

After Oprah cancelled her show on “The Corrections,” Franzen subsequently Emailed me a mea culpa: “I feel terrible that certain unwise remarks of mine, taken out of context, hurt the feelings of a woman who is a reader of mine, an admirer of my work, and one of the real forces of good in the literary life of the nation. I have the greatest respect for and gratitude to readers of all kinds.”

Well, Oprah’s Book Club returned quite some time ago, and for her latest choice, she’s gone even more outré – Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a short, great but brutal novel set in a relentlessly grey future landscape in which food, potable water and even simple humanity are in short supply.

In it, an unnamed man and his son traverse a battered, ashen America in search of – well, something. In perhaps the book’s most disturbing passage, they come upon a rural home housing human captives, awaiting their grim fates to become someone’s menu item:

“He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.

“Jesus, he whispered.

“Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

“Christ, he said. Oh Christ.

“He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry.

“He dropped he lighter. No time to look. He pushed the boy up the stairs. Help us, they called.

“Hurry.

“A bearded face appeared blinking at the foot of the stairs. Please, he called. Please.

“Hurry. For God’s sake hurry.”

Enjoy, Oprah readers!