There's nothing like reading a book in entirely one sitting. Nothing. Especially because it happens rarely, when text and timing align with the stars. Especially when it almost happens, for me, as a surprise. I don't plan to spend afternoons reading books cover to cover. I just do, pausing from time to time between the pages to marvel at the joy of a book read in one big inhale.
For me, it started yesterday at the laundromat. I wanted to bring a book with me, but the Jane Austen and Louise Gluck I have on hand seemed a bit heavyweight for the distracting universe of tumbling machines and clinking quarters. So I grabbed a novel that I hadn't much looked at since it showed up at my doorstep awhile back: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. It seemed light enough for clothes-washing, something to dip into while not worrying much about committing to read the whole thing, and it centered the books and life of a writer I'm growing to admire more and more.
I washed my clothes. I kept reading. And then, four-and-a-half hours later, I was done.
The book surprised me. While I expected it to be enjoyable enough, I was wary of the very prominent conceit of the novel to suffocate any authentic emotion, and that characters would, with irritating cloyness, be contemporary counterparts to Austen's characters who--surprise!--find themselves playing out loosely-veiled situations from the classic novels, only with modern cell-phone acoutrements I picked this book up the way I would pick up any cinematic romantic comedy: maybe I anticipate the formula, but it's a fun escapist ride.
But here's the thing: this book's better than that. First off, Fowler pulls of a omniscient plural first-person point-of-view. Who does that? Who even thinks of that? The "we" speaks as the members of the titular book club, but with a compelling enough voice to naturalize any stiffness you might expect in the narration. The "we" can never be pinpointed on any one character, or set of characters; like trying to figure out what state Springfield is located in in The Simpsons through the process of elimination, this plural narrator can't be placed. It knows things and doesn't know things per the needs of the story, and it has enough charm to keep that from being distracted.
As well, the reader gets relief. The point-of-view doesn't bludgeon you with relentless pages of "we this" and "all of us" that. Chapters are pieced out in something merging on a collage: there is reflective--and really quite wonderful--stories of the characters' pasts that is narrated with what seems to be omniscient third-person; there are excerpts from Mansfield Park; original nonfiction prose about Jane Austen's life; an excerpt from The Mysteries of Udolpho (a popular real-life novel that plays a role in an Austen novel); slams from Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson about Austen's writing; quotations from a nineteenth century handbook on country dancing; a representation of a promotional piece for a contemporary suspense novel; email representations, and so on.
This is how Fowler is able to sustain an unusual point-of-view throughout the novel: by keeping it consistent--it is the place we always return to--without keeping it on every page.
The other thing about the book: very little happens in present time. So often, this is a death knell for books. So weighted in backstory, that stagnate at the point where--by virtue of simply being set in the present--there is a presumed and anticipated urgency. Here, it seems just fine. While I anticipated this novel to play out Jane Austen's insight on social behaviors, especially the romantic and money-minded sides, in the lives of its characters, the plot here isn't nearly so heavy-handed (though, yes, there is consideration of romance and what the characters think about Austen's books tends to reflect easily on their own lives).
The Jane Austen Book Club does something different. Actually, several different things:
- It celebrates the strange and hilarious and exhilarating ways of finding resonance in Jane Austen's novels.
- It explores the hybridization of fact and fiction, of memory and playacting, of reading and rereading.
- In a novel where it might seem to be an artificial strategy to take characters one by one to explore their childhoods and lives and work and loves in unique chapters, Fowler takes the opportunity to tell short stories of real power. Two of them in particular are downright haunting. And while much of what's told in those stories doesn't particularly bear weight on the novel's present-time action, they make a case for the resurrection of the lingering, thoughtful character sketch.
- Jane Austen isn't the only author in this book; Ursula Le Guin and other science fiction writers come onstage. Fowler's novel opens a conversation about genre and literary hierarchies.
- It considers what a happy ending means--or any 'ending' at all--when both the books we love and our lives are open for endless interpretation.
- And, as initially hoped for, it's fun.
Further indicating the book's unusual project is the 'Reader's Guide' at the end. Austen's six novels each receive a couple paragraphs of summary, and notes on when and how Austen wrote it. There is, most fascinatingly, the text of Jane Austen's notes on how her family and friends responded to two of her novels: there are lists about what they liked and didn't like about Mansfield Park and Emma.
Among them, on Mansfield Park:
Fowler also gives us 24 pages of excerpts of "critics, writers and literary figures" who are in all manner and opinion about Austen and novels. The excerpts are dated from 1812-2003.
A select sampling includes:
Every time I read "Pride and Prejudice" I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
1913--Virginia Woolf
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought ...
1993--Gish Jen
I think the next writer to have a really big influence on me was Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice was one of the books that I read backwards and forwards. I really wanted to be Elizabeth Bennet. Of course today, there are people who would say, "Oh, that's so Anglo."; they think I should have been more influenced by a Chinese opera or something.
In all: not bad for a day's play. I'm certainly amped up to return to Sense and Sensibility.
My next Jane Austen title? Northanger Abbey. You heard it here first. The talk in the text piqued my interest, and besides, Facebook tells me the Jane Austen heroine I'm most like is the one in that book.
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