If you're thinking to yourself, you like Jane Austen and you like book clubs so this is a book for you, don't be fooled: The Jane Austen Book Club is awful. Blech. I had this one out from the library for quite some time and never got around to it, only to pick it up again to read it before the movie comes out on DVD. (It did actually come out in the theatre, right? I mean, I saw previews, but never actually saw it listed on the board.) Now, I probably won't watch it on DVD, it was that bad.
Mostly what annoyed me was the disorganization, which I realize is an odd thing to say. But the book's structure is all over the place. I figured this out during the prologue, which is probably when I should have put the book down. The first clue was the narrator, who mostly uses (but not always), "we." But you never figure out which of the main six characters are narrating because even though she's established that it's one of them (page 5), everyone is always spoken about in 3rd person. And then at the end of some of the chapters, Fowler throws in the most random asides that, as far as I can tell, have nothing to do with the story. Take page 77. The chapter that's ending is about Allegra, who's just gone skydiving after breaking up with her girlfriend. Then there's a break, and suddenly a factual page about Austen's struggle to publish Pride and Prejudice. It's like, huh? These little random asides happen at the end of each of the six chapters, but each time they're totally random. One is a small excerpt of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, the book that Austen's characters are reading in Northanger Abbey; another is a couple of paragraphs about a dog show.
So that's me. From a generalist's perspective, for a novel titled The Jane Austen Book Club, it's not much about Jane Austen's books or a book club. It's all strange, very strange.
1 comment:
Great work.
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