36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fun, Cleverly Crafted, Witty and Thoroughly Modern Tale, May 1, 2004
This review is from: The Jane Austen Book Club (Hardcover)
According to Jocelyn, it is "essential to reintroduce Austen into your life regularly...let her look around." This is exactly her aim when she launches the "all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club" and invites five of her friends and acquaintances to meet and discuss one of Austen's novels every month.
Each of the members "has a private Austen," Karen Joy Fowler tells us in the opening line of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. For Jocelyn, a compulsive matchmaker and organizer extraordinaire of other people's lives, Austen "wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married." Bernadette, the oldest member of the group, has lived a colorful sixty-seven years, including a brief foray into show business and several trips to the altar. Her private Austen is "a comic genius."
Sylvia, Jocelyn's childhood friend, has recently separated from her husband of thirty-two years. Not being a happy ending person, Sylvia's Austen is more practical --- "a daughter, a sister, an aunt." For Sylvia's daughter Allegra --- a strikingly beautiful, self-described "garden-variety lesbian" --- Austen writes about "the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women."
Prudie, a high school French teacher afraid to visit France because it might not live up to her expectations, is the youngest member of the group at twenty-eight. Her Austen is the one "whose books changed every time you read them, so that one year they were all romances and the next, you suddenly noticed Austen's cool, ironic prose."
As for Grigg, no one knows who his private Austen is. The only man in the group, he initially raises suspicion among the other members --- for being a man, for being a man in a Jane Austen book club, and for showing up at the first meeting with an obviously brand new collection of Austen's works.
Chapter by chapter, Fowler uses a different Austen novel to illuminate each of her characters. As the months flow by, Jocelyn, Bernadette, Sylvia, Allegra, Prudie and Grigg each face their own changes and challenges. Life, death, marriage, love and friendship were subjects that made for great storytelling in Jane Austen's day ... and they still do, two hundred years later in twenty-first century California.
It will make for a richer reading experience if you're familiar with Austen's novels, but don't despair if you're not; turn to the back of the book for a synopsis of each story. When you finish the last page of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, you won't be able to resist the urge to more thoroughly acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with EMMA, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, NORTHANGER ABBEY, MANSFIELD PARK and PERSUASION. You might even have a better appreciation for them having read this book first.
In 1826, Sir Walter Scott said about the late Jane Austen, "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.... The exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."
What was denied Sir Walter Scott flows effortlessly through Karen Joy Fowler's pen. THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is a pleasure to read. It is a fun, cleverly crafted, witty and thoroughly modern tale that shows us exactly why Austen's novels retain their timeless appeal. Like Austen, Fowler paints the everyday in such a way that makes it easily recognizable, capturing the subtleties of social interaction, family dynamics, the complexities of friendship, the nuances of courtship and the fragility of life.
Included in the book is a reading group guide with a twist --- each of the six characters has contributed "questions for discussion." One of Sylvia's questions asks, "Is a good book better the second time around?" I'll know the answer as soon as I finish reading THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB ... again.
--- Reviewed by Shannon McKenna
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77 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Loved This Book, August 28, 2004
This review is from: The Jane Austen Book Club (Hardcover)
I see here that not everyone agrees with me, but I loved The Jane Austen Book Club. I thought it was cleverly written with wonderful characters and very, very witty. The premise is this: a loosely-connected group of acquaintences forms a book club to discuss Jane Austen's works. Each chapter of the novel focuses both on the Austen book at hand, and the life of the book club member hosting the meeting that month. With six members of the club--well, you are not going to be able to get into the nitty gritty of each member's life without a long, drawn-out magnum opus. Fowler instead chooses to focus on a few events in the various character's lives. They all know each other, so the various members pop up in the other chapters as well. The novel is narrated by all of the book club members, speaking as one voice, which Fowler uses to her advantage on many humorous occasions. Each character is wonderful, yet flawed. The novel is a comedy of manners in the modern sense. You will recognize parts of yourself and others you know in many of the characters. There is no true "plot" to this story, although the love lives of many of the members, while unresolved at the beginning of the novel, resolve themselves towards the end. The lack of plot doesn't matter, however, in this truly cleverly written, enjoyable, engaging novel. I think this one is a must for anyone who loves to read--you don't have to be an Austen fan to enjoy it. I for one think this novel deserves the hype, and believe me, I was pretty sceptical at first. Enjoy this one: it is a treasure.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An ode to the timelessness of human relationships, April 22, 2004
This review is from: The Jane Austen Book Club (Hardcover)
The timelessness of human relationships, the nature of love and the question of happy endings is the central focus of Karen Joy Fowler's whimsical and breezy twenty-first century comedy of manners. Like Austen, Fowler is a master of wit and irony, and with memorable, endearing characters, The Jane Austen Book Club provides a wonderful example of the paradoxes and incongruities that exist in modern human relationships, while also brimming over with astute observations of our foibles and follies. The author has a tart, and gentle manner in which she retells the mistakes and misunderstandings that complicate even our most well-intentioned relationships.
The narrative focuses on a pre-established book club made of up five women and one inscrutable man who meet on a monthly basis to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, one at a time. While deliberating the ins and outs of Austin's characters, they gradually divulge their own private insecurities and Austen-like foibles. There is Jocelyn who has everyone's best interests at heart, along with a strong matchmaking impulse, and an instinct for tidiness. And Prudie, with the years receding behind her like a map "with no landmarks, a handful of air, another of water." There's Silvia who wants to slip off while the author's back is turned "to find love in her own way" showing up in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face. And then there is Allegra, an out lesbian who is a creature of extremes "either stuffed, starving, freezing or boiling, exhausted or electric with energy." She's a liberated woman who sees the world as an obstacle course where you pick your way across it while "the terrain slips about and things fall or explode."
The conversation, like the conversation on Austen is variously shrewd, inconsequential, apparent and amusing, and the drama of each character's lives unfolds at a fast pace. Every month they take a breather from their exhausted lives and sit around talking about their personal daydreams while serving "green salad made with dried cranberries, and candied walnuts, artichoke dips, cheeses, and peppered crackers" (it sounds delicious!). Fowler combines a gentle, uncomplicated way of writing with wonderful powers of description; she sees "the fingernail moon slicing open the clouds, and she describes Allegra's face as "having a silent-screen-star expressiveness and a lunar polish."
Like Austen, Fowler is also exposing and revealing the pursuit of love and saying that virtue, in whatever form, will be recognized, and rewarded. How love will prevail, how life can be a romance, and that happiness in marriage and relationships is mostly a matter of chance, is at the thematic heart of The Jane Austen Book Club. This is a quirky, whimsical and highly original novel and reinforces the notion that relationships and human frailties are not that much different today than they were in Austen's time. Mike Leonard April 04.
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