the jane austen book club by karen joy fowler

Jocelyn, in her early 50's, has never married. But most of each chapter is about the members themselves, their stories told in detours and digressions. The club meetings are peppered with the requisite literary patter (''Why isn't Knightley more appealing?'' or ''Her heroes tend to be actively nondescript''). Fowler plants the bait at the very first meeting of the ''all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club,'' as the members gather on a cool March evening to discuss ''Emma.'' Their hostess, Jocelyn, is a ''control freak'' who has not only organized the club, picked the members and chosen the first book but is also a breeder of aristocratic show dogs and (lest we miss the point) a notorious matchmaker. Nothing here is obvious, though we're lured into thinking otherwise early on. But don't be lulled into the predictable assumption, that each chapter will be ''Persuasion'' or ''Mansfield Park'' in miniature, the respective characters and plots and life lessons presented in neat parallel universes. Six chapters, six characters, six novels: an ingenious structure, and a reassuring one. It's clear from the beginning that in each of the six chapters, a different character will officiate, more or less, over a discussion of a different novel. The action takes place over several months in a university town near Sacramento (it sounds a lot like Davis, where Fowler lives), and the book club comprises five women and one man. At the end are plot synopses of all six Austen novels for the benefit of the forgetful, the uninitiated or the nostalgic. You don't have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. What results is Fowler's shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel.

In her portrait of a California reading group, Karen Joy Fowler turns a mirror on the gawking, voyeuristic presence that lurks in every story: the reader. It's that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about. This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears. ON its surface, ''The Jane Austen Book Club'' is a tidy number, a perfectly cut and polished little gem with just enough facets.

The jane austen book club by karen joy fowler