The Jane Austen Book Club
By Karen Joy Fowler
Penguin Books, 288 pages
If you’re the type who read books for the love of life and cherish the ambiguous humor and paradox the life has to offer; The Jane Austen Book Club is for you.
The story, as its title suggests, revolves around the celebrated six Jane Austen novels and how each stories are interconnected with the five women and a man of the Jane Austen Book Club members.
Set in Sacramento Valley, a university town in California, the book club was initiated by Jocelyn to act as a distraction for her close friend Sylvia, whose husband recently decamped for a relationship with another woman. An expert at getting people together (Sylvia’s husband Daniel was Jocelyn’s boyfriend in high school), Jocelyn considers herself as the “Jane Austen who wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married”.
Grigg, the only male member of the all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club, was initially invited by Jocelyn as another of her matchmaking attempt for Sylvia. Originally an avid fan of science fictions, Grigg on the other hand has a different idea on whom he would like to court.
The other three female members of the club are Allegra, Sylvia’s sensitive but gregarious gay daughter; Bernadette, a witty sixty-something veteran who has seen it all; and Prudie, a fragile high school French teacher who always seem to be seconds away to breaking down due to memories of her neglectful mother.
Playful and observant as Jane Austen herself, the lives of the members of the Jane Austen Book Club is narrated in parallel to the Austen six novels where the members take turn to host discussion of one novel in their house every month.
Six members, six months, and six Austen novels.
Instead of a novel with a plot, The Jane Austen book Club could be seen as the author’s fun attempt to explore character’s lives through the plots in Jane Austen novels. Quick-witted and funny at times, each character seems to have their own valid cultural observation on the world of Jane Austen in relation to their own. Sylvia for instance, in the event of her daughter accident, asks Jocelyn “Why should unhappiness be so much more powerful than happiness?”. She believes herself as the practical Jane Austen who was a daughter, a sister, and an aunt, without the happy ending.
I had read The Jane Austen Book Club way before I watched Pride and Prejudice and read Sense and Sensibility (the only Austen novel I had gotten over so far). Besides, I had read it even before I could grasp the power of being “an acute and nonpartisan observer of people” I didn’t remember whether I had enjoyed reading it or not. These days, as Jocelyn “who could have all kinds of hobby she wants because she is never married”, I read the Jane Austen Book Club again in conjunction with its newly released film and I find myself laughing out loud despite myself.
As put aptly by the producer of the film version of The Jane Austen Book Club, you don’t have to read Jane Austen to read the novel. Instead of a mere replication of Austen novels, Karen Joy Fowler managed to put the stories of the all-the-time-all-Jane-Austen book club members to stand on its own any Austen virgin could enjoy it.
If you love life and are capable of laughing at its apparent incongruity, that is.
