In a 2011 episode of the sitcom "Parks and Recreation," eager-beaver city council candidate Leslie Knope angles to get her book chosen for the town's book club. The selections are the whim of a local TV personality who has already made a best seller of the novel "The Time Traveler's Optometrist" ("a heartwarming story about a caveman eye doctor who travels to present-day Cincinnati and can see everything but love"). When Leslie finally secures the coveted book-club sticker, it turns out to be only marginally smaller than the book's front cover.

The sticker that adorns the selections for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club 2.0, which can be found on every copy of the first printing of the newest pick, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" by Ayana Mathis, is more tactfully sized, but it might as well supplant the dust jacket. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has bent over backward to accommodate Ms. Winfrey, rushing Ms. Mathis's novel into stores a month ahead of schedule and tripling its print run. It even leaked the news of the selection to the New York Times, hoping for publicity touting the choice. The paper's chief fiction critic, Michiko Kakutani, wrote a rave review that appeared online nearly simultaneously with Ms. Winfrey's press release, a piece of timing that turned a critical judgment into an addendum for the marketing campaign.

If Ms. Winfrey can mobilize one of our most powerful publishing houses into action as though it were a pack of panicked cadets at reveille, what chance does a mere author have to escape with her dignity intact? With the possible exceptions of Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, every writer endorsed by Ms. Winfrey has seemed fawning and peripheral when sitting next to her on a couch during her show. Jonathan Franzen will be remembered by wiki-posterity for his ingratitude, his made-for-TV 2001 spat with Ms. Winfrey and their subsequent uplifting reconciliation. So spare a thought for Ms. Mathis, whose career is assured but who will know as she passes through the battery of photo-ops and gassy interviews that her novel has been transformed into just another of Oprah's Favorite Things, along with panini presses and shea-butter bath soaps.

Nevertheless, there is the minor matter of the book's contents, and, at the risk of shouting into the media storm, I should like to look at them. "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" is the choppy, tentatively executed chronicle of Hattie Shepherd and her 11 surviving children (and one grandchild). The novel begins in 1925, shortly after Hattie has moved from Georgia to Philadelphia in the Great Migration that brought so many African-Americans out of the Deep South. Full of hope that Philadelphia is the "New Jerusalem" promised by her preacher, Hattie has married a dockworker named August and given birth to twins, "luminous souls" she believes mark "the beginning of a new nation."

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

By Ayana Mathis
(Knopf, 243 pages, $24.95)

In the opening chapter, however, the twins die of pneumonia. The tragedy hardens Hattie's heart and is compounded by poverty and loneliness—although she and August have many more children, they consider their marriage "beyond love" and both have affairs. The novel turns to the children Hattie bore after the twins, each of whom is crippled in some deep-seated way by the emotional neglect of their upbringing. In a sequence of short chapters, the book slowly travels across five decades, documenting the depths of the damage. Floyd is an itinerant musician forced to hide his homosexuality. Alice marries into a wealthy black family but becomes addicted to pills she takes to calm her hysteria. Bell contracts tuberculosis and nearly lets herself die to spite her mother. Cassie has a breakdown brought on by mental illness. "Here I am, seventy-one years old, and still no end to sick children," Hattie thinks at the close of the novel, and the reader shares her fatigue.

"The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" attempts to show the warping of the dreams of black Americans who hoped to find a better life in the urban North. This means that not only must it bear the pressure of Ms. Winfrey's endorsement, but must also withstand comparisons to two of the epochal works of American fiction, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" and Toni Morrison's linked trilogy "Beloved," "Jazz" and "Paradise" (to say nothing of William Attaway's equally brilliant but underappreciated "Blood on the Forge"). Few debuts could survive this kind of scrutiny, and Ms. Mathis's doesn't come close.

The numerous strands of the plot only sporadically and arbitrarily connect to one another, and Ms. Mathis lacks the skills that a more seasoned author might have to impose a narrative authority on them. A chapter on Hattie's son Billups suggests that he was raped as a boy, but the rest of the book, even those chapters set in the time period of his boyhood, gives no inkling of such a thing taking place. A desperately poor Hattie gives away her youngest daughter to her childless sister, and even though decades pass, we hear nothing of the girl again. Characters appear and vanish without evident design (and though the novel's title makes a bald claim for biblical parallels, any allusions to the 12 tribes of Israel are murky at best). There is very little sense that these men and women even belong to the same family, and the chapters read more like scattered vignettes of mysteriously dysfunctional people.

Yet some of the book is very well crafted. The opening scenes with the death of the twins are controlled and effective. In the strongest chapter, Hattie's son Franklin agonizes over his failed marriage while on a tour of duty in Vietnam; the misery here is sharp-edged and intensified by evocations of beauty. "I make a point of seeing the sunset," Franklin says of his daily routine at war. "It helps me remember that this strange place is still the earth, and I am still on it."

Ms. Mathis will need to cultivate these seeds of promise if she hopes to ever shed the modifier of "Oprah pick" that will now precede her name at every turn. She shouldn't forget amid all this praise that she is being patronized as much as she is being celebrated. As Hattie herself notes: "Sometimes all you have is your own dignity and self-control."

Mr. Sacks writes the fiction chronicle in the Saturday Journal.