Previously, the Only Jane's I Read
Involved Military Aircraft

Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club has charmed many reviewers, including both Patricia T. O'Conner (" This is a surprising novel, and there isn't a boring line in it") and Richard Eder ("Like Austen, the author fashions her frayed and fractious strands into bows at the end; not to compel our belief but detachedly to adorn it") at NYT. At the Detroit Free Press, Marta Salij picks the book for the paper's own monthly book club:

Fowler's story of a book club that reads Jane Austen is so clever and so delightfully written that you don't need to know anything about Jane Austen to love it. All you need to bring is a love of books and of the kinds of stories that have a little love, a little humor and a little pathos all mixed together in them.

Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor, Chris Watson in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, David Kipen in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mollie Wilson in the Village Voice, Anita Sama in USA Today--all encourage you to read it. And so do I, just as Gwenda Bond did unto me, for which I am heartily glad.

As indicated in the headline, I do not have direct experience of Jane Austen's prose, though I did see most of the movies in the late 1990s as they came out. Such unfamiliarity allowed me, in a sense, to see past the discussions Fowler's characters have about Austen and focus on them instead. The initial structure--meetings of the book club with interwoven flashbacks into the life of one of the members--mutates soon enough to keep from becoming repititious, and allows us to get inside certain characters' heads in more intriguing ways. (Only one such effort seems less than perfect on structural grounds, and even that has enough narrative compulsion that it isn't a problem.)

I was particularly struck by the notion that we each have our own private Austen, and that by extension we each have our own genre shaped by our readings across all conventional genres. Which is why I'm as fond of Evelyn Waugh as I am of Bruce Sterling, as fond of Gavin Lambert as of James Ellroy, etc., etc. Said insight leading to one of the novel's most amusing quips:

So Jocelyn was a science fiction reader now. We had no objection. We could see how it might be unsafe for people prone to dystopian fantasies, but as long as science fiction wasn't all you read, as long as there was a large allowance of realism, what was the harm? It was nice to see Grigg looking so happy. Perhaps we would all start reading LeGuin.

As it happens, I'd been dipping into LeGuin recently myself, having recently stumbled upon The Wave in the Mind, a collection of essays about reading and writing. The essay format makes this one easy to pick up whenever I've got a spare moment, so I've been savoring it slowly. So far it doesn't appear to have anything about Jane Austen in it, but who knows?