THE JANE ADDICTION

I've just finished reading the most delightful and entertaining novel, The Jane Austen Book Club,  by Karen Joy Fowler.  You may be shocked to learn I've never been much of an Austen fan, read Pride and Prejudice years ago, started Sense and Sensibility around the same time, but abandoned it.  I actually remember little of what I did read of these books.  Now, however, things may change.  This delicious novel may have convinced me to give Jane herself another try. 

The book takes two very popular subjects, Austen and book clubs, and entwines them, six Austen novels, six chapters, six meetings of the club.  The prologue opens with this sentence:  "Each of us has a private Austen," then the novel proceeds to display the truth of that statement.  The members of the club are six women and one man, of different ages and life conditions.  Along the way we learn a good deal more about their lives, to tell the truth, than we actually do about Austen's novels.  This makes it possible to enjoy the book even if you have not made a close study of the novels themselves - the book commentary is actually rather shallow and perfunctory, whereas the rest of the dialogue is entirely captivating and believeable. It is the lives of the people discussing the books that make this book so entertaining.  Bernadette, Jocelyn, Sylvia, Allegra, Prudie and Grigg are so endearingly portrayed, through a narrative voice that is a little mystifying - sometimes a plural omniscient "we," which then moves into, one at a time, each character's life, history, thoughts - that I felt I knew them well.  And became quite fond of them.  Romance, match-making, happy endings, all these Austenesque elements are here for these characters, albeit in a very 21st century fashion.

At the end of the book there are several interesting appendices:  a Reader's Guide to the Austen novels, quick character and plot summaries - perhaps a good idea to read this first, if it's been a while, or you have never read Austen;  a section called "The Response" which lists reactions and responses to Austen's writing from such diverse personae as members of her own family and friends to Mark Twain ("Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.") to Kingsley Amis to Andy Rooney ("I have never read anything Austen wrote.  I just never got at reading Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. They seemed to be the Bobbsey Twins for grown-ups.") to Margaret Drabble to an editorial in Forbes magazine.  I particularly love Fay Weldon's quote:  "I also think...that the reason no one married her was the same reason Crosby didn't publish Northanger Abbey.  It was just all too much. Something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth:  something capable of taking the world by its heels, and shaking it." 

The third appendix is a wonderful little quirky end note, called "Questions for Discussion" it consists of questions from the characters, members of the book club.  Some of the questions refer back to points raised during discussions of Austen's novels, some have to do with personal events in the characters' lives, some are just darned interesting questions about books and reading, or how they relate to life, in general.  For instance:  Do you ever wish your partner had been written by some other writer, had better dialogue and a more charming way of suffering?  What writer would you choose?   A question worth considering, hmmmmm?