electric mist

Jane Austen's Book Club

There are many spoilers here for Jane Austen's Book Club, so if you want to read this book, you probably want to skip this review. My overall opinion is not positive, however.

I picked up this book on the recommendation of a friend and I thought I would enjoy the concept -- the Austen like interaction of six people meeting for a monthly Austen book discussion. I've read enough of Austen to have a decent background, though that's not necessary for this book, and I was looking forward to watching a new author play with her characters in the same sort of ironic satisfaction that Austen has. Austen wrote multiple layered romances, where some couples (those who behaved properly) ended up marrying well and some (those who behaved poorly) were often doomed to marry badly or worse, be cut from all good society. (Which was about the worst fate Austen had for her villains.) With the promise of six characters -- five women and one man, who was both too old for most of the women and two young for the rest -- and a promise from the book's dust jacket that there would be an affair, a divorce, a couple formed, I expected the sort of wonderful dance of emotions, frustrations and flaunting of social mores that were staples of Austen's work. Since the point of the book was a sort of commentary on Austen (where the writer says each of us has a private Austen) a reflection or a distortion or a meta Austen-ish story while the characters were moving through the year, through the books and through their ever-intwining lives didn't seem to be too much to expect.

By the end of the prologue, (a bare five pages), I had started having serious doubts, but not as much because of the content of the prologue as the form. The writer starts off in what seems like third person, describing briefly each person who was in the group. Then after the descriptions, the POV shifts to second person, with sentences like, "The six of us..." and "Our first meeting..." which obviously implies one of the characters is narrating that, right? Only, when I counted the characters the narrator listed, all six were included (back to third person)... which meant either the narrator was referring to himself / herself in the third person when he/she listed who all was in the club, or the whole thing was bad form.

This is extremely annoying. It's not cute, it's not useful, it doesn't serve a purpose throughout the entire book. I was willing to forgive the prologue because I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt that maybe she (the author) was being vague about who was narrating because it was going to be a part of some important reveal later. It is within the realm of possibility that I missed it somewhere, but I doubt it. The book shifts between third and second person, and then in one long chapter, there's a first person account. It's not even consistent between chapters or within the chapter. It felt as if what the author wanted to do was an intimate third person type of story, alternating between the six characters to get close in on their view of the meeting, the stories, the discussion and the events, but instead, either didn't know how to do that or confused (or ignorantly chose) second person whenever she wanted to get into that point of view. Each individual section wasn't bad, and there's a lot of fine writing in this book. (By God there better be, given the blurbs from some pretty famous people on the cover, but I digress.) The whole, however, kept me off kilter, uneasy and unable to really enjoy the book because I kept wondering, who's telling this story? Who's using the pronouns "Our" and "We" here?

If that had been my only problem, I may have been able to dismiss it early on as a quirky style of the author, serving some purpose that had brought me enjoyment, but since the story was really mostly a string of excuses to tell a lot of characters' backstories, it wasn't working. Each chapter focuses on the person hosting that month's event and uses that as an excuse to go deeply into their backstory. I could have forgiven even this (which reminded me of six poor attempts to start a novel), if these stories had impacted the rest of the chapter, had then had a deep relevance to the actions / interactions that followed, but they did not. There were surface interactions, and histories given of past interactions, but not a whole lot happening at those meetings. In fact, once the backstories were done, the chapters were pretty much done. The potential for conflict, which was built up from the beginning, always either faded or slid past unattended, as if all the nasty stuff happened off screen and what we were left to witness was the polite version of the aftermath. Tepid reactions when tremendous conflicts are riding beneath the surface ruin books, and for me, it ruined the potential this book had.

What frustrates me more about seeing a book like this not only get published, but get raves from people who should know better -- famous authors -- is that these mistakes are essentially those of a first time novelist, though the author doesn't have that as an excuse. How on earth, I kept wondering, did this get published? There's very little actual story in the book, aside from the pieces of background on each character. We see very little (or no) change in most of the characters, almost no conflict, almost no reaction to the conflicts or questions that face each character. My biggest disappointment was in the story of Grigg and (major spoilers) Jocelyn. Austen was famous for having the "right" couple get together by the end of the book, in spite of whatever obstacle was standing in their way, and age and being oblivious was in the way for Jocelyn, who is older than Grigg. We have no sense of why he has fallen so hard for her, in spite of seeing the backstory when they first met. We have no sense of what she might see in him, since they don't seem to talk all that much, don't comment on one another to anyone else, don't interact much, and don't seem to be thinking about each other much, but he's supposedly in love with her and she's thinking of him for her about-to-be-divorced friend. When she does start looking at him as a possibility, she assesses him in the same sort of terminology she does for the dogs she breeds (okay, funny, but so dissatisfying at the same time, since the author doesn't go further). One of the things Austen did when her heroines finally realized they were in love with the hero of the book was to assess them, and typically, it was as the "finest man [they] knew" -- in all that meant -- integrity, honesty, socially, morally, and so on. Of course, dead sexy was generally expounded on somewhere along the way in more reticent Austenian terminology, and it's somewhat implied here, but not nearly with the same sort of satisfaction. Jocelyn fights the potential because Grigg is younger than she is (and hell, they've barely talked), and when she does finally give in, we never see how that makes her feel, what she thinks about the age difference, whether he thinks about it at all, or not. There's no real moment. In fact, for several of the characters, there are no real moments when there should have been -- when one leaves a lover, when she finds a new one (who seems great and exciting for her), and then inexplicably, has left that one and returned to the idiot she had been with in the beginning (with no explanation, no reason, no discussion / thoughts, anything, just that she'd done it and no one thought that would last). And so on, for each character.

I normally wouldn't write such a rant about a book, but within the story, there really is quite fine writing. The author has a superb sense of dry humor and there were several times when something made me laugh out loud, a real feat when I was so very annoyed with so much else. This was one of those books which could have been so flat out amazing, it made you wonder why you bothered writing at all. (I read one like that recently and hope to put up a review, probably tomorrow.) Instead, it missed its own potential by a mile, which is a true shame, since the author seems to have had so much going for her and so many presumably knowledgeable people read it and not notice any of these things.

Or else, maybe it's all just me, and I am really cranky. (But I don't think that's it.)

Posted by toni at July 26, 2004 01:08 PM