Sitting comfortably atop the US bestseller lists ... Mitch Albom. Photograph: Gino Domenico/AP
An item in Mark Sanderson's diary column for the Sunday Telegraph, Literary Life (unavailable online, somewhat mysteriously), set me thinking. Quoting "recently released sales figures" - what appears to be the Publishers Weekly yearly list (which also seems to be unavailable online) - Sanderson relates how Jeffery Archer was the biggest-selling British hardback novelist in 2006, stateside.
He is quoted as selling 274,938 copies of False Impression, an art-heist caper from the perjuring peer which made little impression on the British top 100. But this excellent showing pales into insignificance, says Sanderson, in comparison with the books at the top of the US lists. Mitch Albom sold almost exactly ten times as many, a staggering 2,735,232 copies of For One More Day .
Which was enough to make my head spin. Not because that's a hell of a lot of books (the number one in the UK, Kate Mosse, sold "only" 851,000), but because I had never even heard of Mitch Albom.
Turns out I've not been paying attention - he's already had two New York Times number one bestsellers. This journalist and broadcaster seems to have found his schtick a few years back with his first runaway success, Tuesdays With Morrie. In it he describes how he got back in touch with one of his college professors, Morrie Schwartz, after twenty years, and visited him in his study every week, just as he used to in college, until Schwartz died of cancer. According to the Random House website, "their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live". Oprah Winfrey turned it into an Emmy-winning TV film, starring Jack Lemmon.
His next smash hit, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, is a novel in much the same vein. A "grizzled war veteran" dies in a "tragic accident" and awakens to discover that heaven is a place where "your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it". But was Eddie's life a "heroic success" or a "devastating failure"? This time the TV film starred Jon Voight.
Albom's latest ploughs the same sort of territory. This time the guy going back over life's twists and turns is Charley "Chick" Benetto, who returns to his hometown with plans to "do himself in". "But upon failing to do even that", he returns to his old house to find "his mother - who died eight years earlier - is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened". Oprah Winfrey is producing a TV film to air this December.
Now, I haven't read a single word of any of these three books, but none of them looks like a number one British bestseller. Which I find just a little odd. Almost as odd as the fact that only a couple of names on the Granta list of young American novelists are familiar over here. You see, I've always had the impression that UK literary culture is strongly linked to the US - just think of Pynchon, Roth, Heller after all.
But maybe the divide is bigger than we think.
