We Are Not Amused

This week, the Slate book club considers Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which I've mentioned before. Unlike many reviewers, Meghan O'Rourke hasn't fully cottoned to the book or its first person plural voice, finding in it a "coy cutesiness" that leads to in-jokes over narrative nuance and character development. Stephen Metcalf was even less impressed:

When readers start giving each other the high-hat about what they like and why—and more virulently, about what should be taught and why—a noble aspiration (to round out the canon with the unwhite, the unmale, and even sometimes the undead) gets easily confused with a base aspiration: to market to people on the basis of what we might call their census identity, as women, African-American, young adult, etc. I was delighted to be reading a book from the point of view of middle-aged, bookwormy women; I started to run out of gas, and early, when it became clear it was targeted, like the old International Coffee ads, pretty exclusively to middle-aged, bookwormy women.

Considering the severity of their judgment in Tuesday's installment, one wonders what they'll find to talk about for the rest of the week. But apparently at least one installment will touch upon how allegedly un-male the single male protagonist is, which should be interesting; I'll admit that he comes uncomfortably close in some respects to a Sensitive New Age Guy, but I was somewhat intrigued by how Fowler combined those personality traits with his background in science-fiction fandom to make him a Sensitive Sci-Fi Nerd.