The Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler
It's like she took all of the things I hate about a Jane Austen book, recreated them in a modern setting, and buried them in boring backstory. Nothing much happens in this book. A couple of people break up; a couple of people hook up; but mostly they just sit around and talk about inconsequential things. It was hard to like anyone but equally hard to hate anyone--I just didn't care.
Is it just me? There's a certain missing depth factor in Austen, at least when I read it, and it's missing here, too. Let me compare this book to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Both books have a small circle of friends who meet periodically. In both books the friends support each other in times of need. Both sets of friends travel the circumference of a sphere, starting at one point, spreading out into separate, curving lines, then ending up back together, at the opposite pole from where they started. They end at a different point but it's still a point on the same surface. Same world; same friends; same reality.
The difference is that in SOTTP the people live real lives in a real world and I, the reader, am right there with them. I have to know how it ends. I'm in there, sharing the pain, the joy, the worry and the quiet pride.
In this book, I was just a casual bystander. Watching a made-for-TV movie. "Yeah, that was interesting. I guess."
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