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The
Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Characters Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel, The Jane
Austen Book Club, provides very satisfying reading for many reasons. She
structures the book based on the six Austen novels, and populates the book
club with six members, five women and a man (just about the right proportion
of Austen readers, in my humble opinion). Fowler then proceeds to present
just enough about her characters and the Austen characters to link them in
ways similar to those a book club would do as the relationships from fiction
resonate with the real world. Fowler’s love of Austen is clear through this
book, her understanding of modern relationships deep and revealing, and her
mastery of modern manners superb. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Three, pp. 81-89: in
which we read Her
perfect security in such a téte-a-téte. . . was
unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments. ( Prudie and Jocelyn had met two years before, at a Sunday
matinee of Prudie was pretty sure this was about tile
horse. She hadn’t spoken up. She sat and seethed over her Red Vines and thought
about moving, hut only if it could be done without an implied accusation;
she was, ask anyone, courteous to a fault. She was just beginning to take an
unwelcome and distracting interest in Rajah’s appetite when Jocelyn leaned
forward. “Go gossip in the lobby,” Jocelyn said. You could tell that she was
not a woman to be trifled with. Send her to deal with your cowboy types. Send
her to feed your oh-so-sensitive horses. “Excuse me,” the woman responded
resentfully. “Like your movie is so much more important than my real life.”
But she fell silent, and Prudie didn’t really care
that she was offended, an offended silence being just as silent as a
flattered one. This silence lasted the whole movie, which was all that
mattered. The gossipers left at the credits, hut the true Janeite was truly gracious, and stayed for the final
chord, the white screen. Prudie knew without
looking that Jocelyn would still be there when she turned to thank her. They talked more as they threaded
through the seats. Jocelyn turned out to like fiddling about with the
original story no better than Prudie
did. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You
might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained
whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time
through, less so the second. The movies, as everyone knew, had no
respect for this. All the characters had been altered-——Fanny’s horrid aunt
Mrs. Norris was diminished simply by lack of screen time; her uncle Mr.
Bertram, a hero in the book, was now accused of slave—dealing and sexual
predations; and all the rest were portrayed in broad strokes or reinvented.
Most provocative was the amalgamation of Fanny with Austen herself, which
scraped oddly at times, as the two were nothing alike—Fanny so shrinking and
Austen so playful. What resulted was a character who thought and spoke like
Jane, but acted and reacted like Fanny. It made no sense. Not that you couldn’t understand the
screenwriter’s motivation. No one loved Austen more than Prudie,
ask anyone. But even Prudie found the character of
Fanny Price hard going. Fanny was the prig in your first-grade class who
never, ever misbehaved and who told the teacher when anyone else did. How to
keep the movie audience from loathing her? While Austen, by some accounts,
had been quite a flirt, full of life and charm. More like So Austen had given Mary all her own
wit and sparkle, and none of it to Fanny. Prudie
had always wondered why, then, not only Fanny but also Austen seemed to
dislike Mary so much. Saying all this took time. Prudie and Jocelyn stopped at the Cafe Roma to have a cup
of coffee together and examine their responses more minutely. Dean, Prudie’s husband, left them there and went home to
reappraise the movie in solitude while catching the second half of the 49er—Viking
game. On her first reading, She expected a lively
exchange and had so much to say herself, she’d been
filling index cards for several days in order to remember it all. Prudie was a great believer in organization, a natural
Girl Scout. She had lists of things to be cleaned, things to be cooked,
things to be said. She was serious about her hosting. With
power—responsibility. But the day began, ominously,
with something unexpected. She appeared to have picked up a virus in her
e-mail. There was a note from her mother: “Missing my darling. Thinking of
corning for a visit.” But then there were two more notes that had her
mothers return address plus attachments, when her mother hadn’t mastered
attachments yet. The e-mails themselves read, “Here is a powful
tool. I hope you will like,” and “Here is something you maybe enjoy.” The
identical “powful tool” message came again in
another e-mail. This one seemed to be from Susan in the attendance office. Prudie had planned to send out a reminder
that, because of the heat, the book club would meet at eight instead of
seven-thirty that night, hut she didn’t wish to risk spreading the infection.
She shut down without even answering her mother’s note. The predicted temperature
for the day was a hundred six. This, too, was bad news. Prudie
had planned to serve a compote, but no one was going
to touch anything hot. She’d better stop by the store after work and get some
fruit for a sherbet. Maybe root beer floats. Easy, hut fun! Dean lurched out of bed
just in time to kiss her good-bye. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt,
which was a good look for him, and how many men could you say that about? Dean
had been staying up at night to watch soccer. He was in training for the
World Cup, for those games that would soon he shown live from whatever time
zone “I’ve got book club.” “Which book?” “ “I guess I’ll skip that
one,” Dean said. “Maybe rent the movie.” “You’ve already been to
the movie,” Prudie answered. She was a tiny hit
distressed. They’d been to it together. How could he not remember? Only then
did she see that he was teasing her. It was a measure of how distracted she
was, because she was usually quick to catch a joke. Anyone could tell you
that. “How
long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the
kings of accession, and most of the principal events of
their reigns!” “… and of the
Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great
deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and
distinguished philosophers.” ( Prudie gave her third-period students a
chapter of Le Petit Prince to translate—”La seconde
planéte était habitée par un vaniteux”—and took a seat in the hack
of the classroom to finalize her notes for book club. (The secret to teaching
was to place yourself where you could see them but they couldn’t see you.
Arid nothing was more deadly than the reverse. Chalkboards were for chumps.) It was already way too
hot. The air was still, with an odor faintly locker-room. Prudie’s
neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her hack, hut her
fingers slid on the pen. The so-called temporary buildings (they would last
no longer than Shakespeare’s plays) in which she taught had no
air-conditioning. It was hard to keep the students’ attention in May. It was
always hard to keep the students’ attention. The temperature made it
impossible. Prudie looked about the room and saw
several of them wilted over their desks, limp as old lettuce leaves. She saw little sign of
work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or
stared out the windows. In the parking lot, hot
air billowed queasily over the hoods of cars. Lisa Streit
had her hair in her face and her work in her lap. There was something
especially brittle about her today, the aura of the recent dumpee. She’d been dating a senior and, Prudie had no doubt, pressured daily to give it up to
him. Prudie hoped she’d been dumped because she
hadn’t done so rather than dumped because she had. Lisa was a sweet girl who
wanted to he liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college,
when being likable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said something
low and nasty, and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Prudie rose to go see, she believed, she’d find Elijah
Wallace and Katy Singh playing hangman. Elijah was probably gay, hut neither
he nor Katy knew it yet. It was too much to hope the secret word would be
French. In fact, why bother? Why
bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with
hormones they couldn’t possibly learn a complex system like calculus or
chemistry, much less the wild tangle of a foreign language. Why put everyone
to the aggravation of making them try? Prudie
thought that she could just do the rest of it—watch them for signs of suicide
or weapons or pregnancy or drug addiction or sexual abuse—hut asking her to
teach them French at the same time was really too much. There were days when just
the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw, infected
skin around a brand-new piercing touched Prudie
deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful than they would ever
realize. (There were also days when adolescents seemed like an infestation in
her otherwise comfortable life. Often these were the same days.) Trey Norton, on the other
hand, was beautiful and knew it— wounded eyes, slouched clothes, heavy,
swinging walk. Beauté du
diable. “New dress?” he’d asked Prudie while taking his seat today. He’d looked her over,
and his open assessment was both unsettling and infuriating. Prudie certainly knew how to dress professionally. If she
was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a
suit? “Hot,” he’d said. He was angling for a better grade than
he deserved, and Prudie was just barely too old to be
taken in. She wished she were old enough to be impervious. In her late
twenties, suddenly, unnervingly, she found herself wishing to sleep with
nearly every man she saw. The explanation could he only chemical,
because Prudie was not that sort of woman. Here at
school every breath she took was a soup of adolescent pheromones. Three years
of concentrated daily exposure—how could this not have an effect? She’d tried to defuse such thoughts by
turning them medicinally, as needed, to Austen. Laces and bonnets. Country
lanes and country dances. Shaded estates with pleasant prospects. But the
strategy had backfired. Now, often as not, when she thought of whist, sex
came also to mind. From time to time she imagined bringing all this up in the
teachers’ lounge. “Do you ever find yourself. . .“ she would begin. (As if!) She’d actually been
sexually steadier her first time through high school, a fact that could only
dismay her now. There was nothing about those years to remember with
satisfaction. She had grown early and by sixth grade was far too tall.
“They’ll catch up,” her mother had told her (without being asked, that’s how
obvious the problem was). And she was perfectly right. When Prudie graduated, most of the boys had topped her by a
couple of inches at least. What her mother didn’t
know, or didn’t say, was how little this would matter by the time it
happened. In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You
could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson,
not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter, or
you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses,
compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in the
school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you’d
still he the same grotesque you’d always been. Meanwhile, at restaurants, the beach,
the movies, men who should have been looking at her mother began to look at Prudie instead. They brushed past her in the grocery
store, deliberately grazing her breasts. They sat too close on the bus, let their legs fall against her at the movies. Old
men in their thirties whistled when she walked by. Prudie
was mortified, and this appeared to he the point; the more mortified she
became, the more pleased the men seemed to be. The first time a boy asked to
kiss her (in college) she’d thought he was making fun of her. So Prudie was
not pretty and she was not popular. There was no reason she couldn’t have
been nice. Instead, to bolster her social position at school, she’d
sometimes joined in when the true outcasts were given their daily dose of
torment. She’d seen this as a diversionary tactic at the time, shameful hut
necessary. Now it was unbearable to remember. Could she have really been so
cruel? Someone else perhaps had tripped Megan Stahl on the asphalt and
kicked her hooks away. Megan Stahl, Prudie could
now see, had probably been slightly retarded as well as grindingly poor. As a teacher Prudie
watched out for such children, did her best for them. (But what could a
teacher do? No doubt she made things worse as often as she made them better.)
This atonement must have been the real reason she’d chosen the career,
although at the time it had seemed to be about loving Precious little in Mansfield Park supported
the possibility of fundamental reform. “Character is set early.” Prudie wrote this on a notecard,
followed it with examples: Henry Crawford, the rake, improves temporarily,
but can’t sustain it. Aunt Norris and cousin Maria are, throughout the book,
as steadfast in their meanness and their sin as Fanny and cousin Edmund are
in their propriety. Only cousin Tom, after a brush with death and at the
very, very end of the book, manages to amend. It was enough to give Prudie hope. Perhaps she was not as horrible as she
feared. Perhaps she was not beyond forgiveness, even from Jane. But at the very moment she thought
this, her fingers, slipping up and down her pen, put her in mind of something
decidedly, unforgivably un-Austenish. She looked up
and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no surprise.
Trey was as sensitive to any lewd thought as a dowser to water. He smiled at
her, and it was such a smile as no boy should give his high school teacher.
(Or no high school teacher should attribute such things to the mere act of
baring one’s teeth. My bad, Jane. Pardonnez-moi.) “Do you need something, Trey?” Prudie asked. She dropped the pen, wiped her hands on her
skirt. “You know what I need,” he answered.
Paused a deliberate moment. Held his work up. She rose to go see, but the bell rang. “Allez-vous en!” Prudie said
playfully, and Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The
other students gathered their papers, their binders, their books. Went off to
sleep in someone else’s class. Teachers
may find a particular kinship with Prudie, but all
readers will find appealing characters on the pages of The Jane
Austen Book Club, and will enjoy Fowler’s fine writing. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the November 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Jane Austen Book Club.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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