The Jane Austen Book Club Part 1

The Jane Austen Book Club.

Karen Joy Fowler.

FOR SEAN PATRICK JAMES TYRRELL.

Missing and forever missed.

Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

-JANE AUSTEN,Emma

Prologue.

Each of us has a private Austen.

Jocelyn's Austen wrote wonderful novels about love and court-s.h.i.+p, but never married. The book club was Jocelyn's idea, and she handpicked the members. She had more ideas in one morn-ing than the rest of us had in a week, and more energy, too. It was essential to reintroduce Austen into your life regularly, Jocelyn said, let her look around. We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

Bernadette's Austen was a comic genius. Her characters, her di-alogue remained genuinely funny, not like Shakespeare's jokes, which amused you only because they were Shakespeare's and you owed him that.

Bernadette was our oldest member, just rounding the bend of sixty-seven. She'd recently announced that she was, officially, let-ting herself go. "I just don't look in the mirror anymore," she'd told us. "I wish I'd thought of it years ago....

"Like a vampire," she added, and when she put it that way, we wondered how it was that vampires always managed to look so dapper. It seemed that more of them should look like Bernadette.

Prudie had once seen Bernadette in the supermarket in her bedroom slippers, her hair sticking up from her forehead as if she hadn't even combed it. She was buying frozen edamame and capers and other items that couldn't have been immediately needed.

Bernadette's favourite book wasPride and Prejudice; she'd told Jocelyn that it was probably everyone's favourite. She recom-mended starting with it. But Sylvia's husband of thirty-two years had just asked for a divorce, and Jocelyn would not subject her, the news so recent and tender, to the dishy Mr. Darcy. "We'll start withEmma," Jocelyn had answered. "Because no one has ever read it and wished to be married."

Jocelyn met Sylvia when they were both eleven years old; they were in their early fifties now. Sylvia's Austen was a daughter, a sister, an aunt. Sylvia's Austen wrote her books in a busy sitting room, read them aloud to her family, yet remained an acute and non-partisan observer of people. Sylvia's Austen could love and be loved, but it didn't cloud her vision, blunt her judgment.

It was possible that Sylvia was the whole reason for the book club, that Jocelyn wished only to keep her occupied during a dif-ficult time. That would be like Jocelyn. Sylvia was her oldest and closest friend.

Wasn't it Kipling who said, "Nothing like Jane when you're in a tight spot"? Or something very like that?

I think we should be all women," Bernadette suggested next. "The dynamic changes with men. They pontificate rather than communicate. They talk more than their share."

Jocelyn opened her mouth.

"No one can get a word in," Bernadette warned her. "Women are too tentative to interrupt, no matter how long someone has gone on.

Jocelyn cleared her throat.

"Besides, men don't do book clubs," Bernadette said. "They see reading as a solitary pleasure. When they read at all." Jocelyn closed her mouth.

Yet the very next person she asked was Grigg, whom we none of us knew. Grigg was a neat, dark-haired man in his early for-ties. The first thing you noticed about him was his eyelashes, which were very long and thick. We imagined a lifetime of aunts regretting the waste of those lashes in the face of a boy.

We'd known Jocelyn long enough to wonder whom Grigg was intended for. Grigg was too young for some of us, too old for the rest. His inclusion in the club was mystifying.

Those of us who'd known Jocelyn longer had survived multi-ple setups. While they were still in high school, she'd introduced Sylvia to the boy who would become her husband, and she'd been maid of honour at the wedding three years after they gradu-ated. This early success had given her a taste for blood; she'd never recovered. Sylvia and Daniel. Daniel and Sylvia. Thirty-plus years of satisfaction, though it was, of course, harder to take pleasure in that just now.

Jocelyn had never been married herself, so she had ample time for all sorts of hobbies.

She'd spent fully six months producing suitable young men for Sylvia's daughter, Allegra, when Allegra turned nineteen. Now Allegra was thirty, and the fifth person asked to join our book club. Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.

Allegra got short, expensive haircuts and wore cheap, s.e.xy shoes, but neither of those facts would have made any of us think twice if she hadn't also, on occasions too numerous to count, re-ferred to herself as a lesbian. Jocelyn's inability to see what had never been hidden eventually became offensive, and Sylvia took her aside and asked why she was having so much trouble getting it. Jocelyn was mortified.

She switched to suitable young women. Jocelyn ran a kennel and bred Rhodesian Ridgebacks. The dog world was, as it hap-pily turned out, awash in suitable young women.

Prudie was the youngest of us at twenty-eight. Her favourite novel wasPersuasion, the last completed and the most sombre. Prudie's was the Austen whose books changed every time you read them, so that one year they were all romances and the next you sud-denly noticed Austen's cool, ironic prose.

Prudie's was the Austen who died, possibly of Hodgkin's disease, when she was only forty-one years old.

Prudie would have liked it if we'd occasionally acknowledged the fact that she'd won her invitation as a genuine Austen devo-tee, unlike Allegra, who was really there only because of her mother. Not that Allegra wouldn't have some valuable insights; Prudie was eager to hear them. Always good to know what the lesbians were thinking about love and marriage.

Prudie had a dramatic face, deep-set eyes, white, white skin, and shadowed cheeks. A tiny mouth and lips that almost disap-peared when she smiled, like the Ches.h.i.+re cat, only opposite. She taught French at the high school and was the only one of us cur-rently married, unless you counted Sylvia, who soon wouldn't be. Or maybe Grigg-we didn't know about Grigg-but why would Jocelyn have invited him if he was married? None of us knew who Grigg's Austen was.

The six of us-Jocelyn, Bernadette, Sylvia, Allegra, Prudie, and Grigg-made up the full roster of the Central Valley/River City all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club. Our first meeting was at Jocelyn's house.

March

CHAPTER ONE.

in which we gather at Jocelyn's to discussEmma.

We sat in a circle on Jocelyn's screened porch at dusk, drink-ing cold sun tea, surrounded by the smell of her twelve acres of fresh-mowed California gra.s.s. There was a very pretty view. The sunset had been a spectacular dash of purple, and now the Berryessa mountains were shadowed in the west. Due south in the springtime, but not the summer, was a stream.

"Just listen to the frogs," Jocelyn said. We listened. Appar-ently, somewhere beneath the clamour of her kennel of barking dogs was a chorus of frogs.

She introduced us all to Grigg. He had brought the Gramercy edition of the complete novels, which suggested that Austen was merely a recent whim. We really could not approve of someone who showed up with an obviously new book, of someone who had the complete novels on his lap when onlyEmma was under discussion. Whenever he first spoke, whatever he said, one of us would have to put him in his place. This person would not be Bernadette. Though she'd been the one to request girls only, she had the best heart in the world; we weren't surprised that she was making Grigg welcome. "It's so lovely to see a man taking an interest in Miss Austen," she told him. "Delightful to get the male perspective. We're so pleased that you're here." Bernadette never said anything once if it could be said three times. Sometimes this was annoying, but mostly it was restful. When she'd arrived, she seemed to have a large bat hanging over her ear. It was just a leaf, and Jocelyn removed it as they hugged.

Jocelyn had two portable heaters going, and the porch hummed cosily. There were Indian rugs and Spanish-tile floors of a red that might hide dog hair, depending on the breed. There were porcelain lamps in the shape of ginger jars, round and Oriental, and with none of the usual dust on the bulbs, because it was Jocelyn's house. The lamps were on timers. When it was suffi-ciently dark out, at the perfect moment, they would snap on all at once like a choir. This hadn't happened yet, but we were look-ing forward to it. Maybe someone would be saying something brilliant.

The only wall held a row of photographs-Jocelyn's dynasty of Ridgebacks, surrounded by their ribbons and pedigrees. Ridgebacks are a matriarchal breed; it's one of their many attrac-tive features.

Put Jocelyn in the alpha position and you have the makings of an advanced civilization.

Queenie of the Serengeti looked down on us, doe eyes and troubled, intelligent brow. It's hard to capture a dog's personal-ity in a photograph; dogs suffer more from the flattening than people do, or cats even. Birds photograph well because their spir-its are so guarded, and anyway, often the real subject is the tree. But this was a flattering likeness, and Jocelyn had taken it herself.

Beneath Queenie's picture, her daughter, Sunrise on the Sa-hara, lay, in the flesh, at our feet. She had only just settled, having spent the first half-hour moving from one of us to the next, puff-ing hot stagnant-pond smells into our faces, leaving hairs on our pants. She was Jocelyn's favourite, the only dog allowed inside, al-though she was not valuable, since she suffered from hyperthy-roidism and had had to be spayed. It was a shame she wouldn't have puppies, Jocelyn said, for she had the sweetest disposition.

Jocelyn had recently spent more than two thousand dollars on vet bills for Sahara. We were glad to hear this; dog breeding, we'd heard, could make a person cruel and calculating. Jocelyn hoped to continue competing her, though the kennel would de-rive no benefit; it was just that Sahara missed it so. If her gait could be smoothed out-for Ridgebacks it was all about the gait-she could still show, even if she never won. (But Sahara knew when she'd lost; she became subdued and reflective. Sometimes some-one was sleeping with the judge and there was nothing to be done about it.) Sahara's compet.i.tive category was s.e.xually Al-tered b.i.t.c.h.

The barking outside ascended into hysteria. Sahara rose and walked stiffly to the screen door, her ridge bristling like a tooth-brush.

"Why isn't Knightley more appealing?" Jocelyn began. "He has so many good qualities. Why don't I warm to him?"

We could hardly hear her; she had to repeat herself. The con-ditions were such, really, that we should have been discussing Jack London.

Most of what we knew about Jocelyn came from Sylvia. Little Jocelyn Morgan and little Sylvia Sanchezhad met at a Girl Scout camp when they were eleven years old, and they were fifty-something now.

They'd both been in the Chippewa cabin, work-ing on their wood-lore badges. They had to make campfires from tepees of kindling, and then cook over them, and then eat what they'd cooked; the requirement wasn't satisfied unless the Scout cleaned her plate. They had to identify leaves and birds and poi-sonous mushrooms. As if any one of them would ever eat a mush-room, poisonous or not.

For their final requirement they'd been taken in teams of four to a clearing ten minutes off and left to find their own way back. It wasn't hard, they'd been given a compa.s.s and a hint: The din-ing hall was southwest of them.

Camp lasted four weeks, and every Sunday Jocelyn's parents drove up from the city-three and a half hours-to bring her the Sunday funnies. "Everyone liked her anyway," Sylvia said. This was hard to believe, even for us, and we all liked Jocelyn a ton. "She was attractively ill informed."

Jocelyn's parents adored her so, they couldn't bear to see her unhappy. She'd never been told a story with a sad ending. She knew nothing about DDT or n.a.z.is. She'd been kept out of school during the Cuban missile crisis because her parents didn't want her learning we had enemies.

"It fell to us Chippewas to tell her about communists," said Sylvia. "And child molesters. The Holocaust.

Serial killers. Men-struation. Escaped lunatics with hooks for hands. The Bomb. What had happened to the real Chippewas.

"Of course, we didn't have any of it right. What a mash of misinformation we fed her. Still, it was realer than what she got at home. And she was very game, you had to admire her.

"It all came cras.h.i.+ng down on the day we had to find our way back to camp. She had this paranoid fantasy that while we were hiking and checking our compa.s.s, they were packing up and moving out. That we would come upon the cabin and the dining hall and the latrines, but all the people would be gone.

Even more, that there would be dust and spider webs and crumbling floorboards. It would be as if the camp had been abandoned for a hundred years. We might have told her too manyTwilight Zone plots.

"But here's the weird part. On the last day, her parents came to pick her up, and on the drive back, they told her that they'd gotten divorced over the summer. In fact, she'd been sent off just for this purpose.

All those Sunday drives together bringing the funnies, and they couldn't actually stand each other. Her dad was living in a hotel in San Francisco and had been the whole month she was gone. 'I eat all my meals in the hotel restaurant,' he told her. 'I just come down for breakfast and order whatever catches my fancy.' Jocelyn said he made it sound as though that were the only reason he'd moved out, because restaurant eating would be so swell. She felt she'd been traded for s.h.i.+rred eggs."

One day several years later he called her to say he had a touch of the flu. Nothing for her to worry her darling head about. They had tickets to a baseball game, but he didn't think he could make it, he'd have to take a rain check. Go, Giants! It turned out the flu was a heart attack. He didn't get to the hospital until he was al-ready dead.

"No wonder she grew up a bit of a control freak," Sylvia said. With love. Jocelyn and Sylvia had been best friends for more than forty years.

There's no heat with Mr. Knightley," Allegra said. She had a very expressive face, like Lillian Gish in a silent movie. She frowned when she was making a point, had done this since she was a tiny girl. "Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax meet in secret and quar-rel with each other and make it up and lie to everyone they know. You believe they're in love because they behave so badly. You can imagine s.e.x. You neverfeel that with Mr. Knightley." Allegra had a lullaby voice, low, yet penetrating. She was often impatient with us, but her tones were so soothing we usually realized it only afterward.

"That's true," Bernadette agreed. Behind the lenses of her tiny gla.s.ses her eyes were round as pebbles.

"Emma is always saying how reserved Jane is, even Mr. Knightley says so, and he's so perceptive about everyone. But she's the only one in the whole book"-the lights came on, which made Bernadette jump, but she didn't miss a word for it-"who ever seems desperately in love. Austen says that Emma and Mr.

Knightley make an unexceptional marriage." She paused reflectively. "Clearly she approves. I expect the word 'unexceptional' meant something different in Austen's day. Like, nothing to be ashamed of.

Noth-ing to set tongues wagging. Neither reaching too high nor stoop-ing too low."

Light poured like milk over the porch. Several large winged insects hurled themselves against the screens, frantic to find it, follow it to the source. This resulted in a series of thumps, some of them loud enough to make Sahara growl.

"No animal pa.s.sion," said Allegra.

Sahara turned. Animal pa.s.sion. She had seen things in the kennels. Things that would make your hair stand on end.

"No pa.s.sion at all." Prudie repeated the word, but p.r.o.nounc-ing it as if it were French. Pah-see-ohn.

Because she taught French, this wasn't as thoroughly obnoxious as it might have been.

Not that we liked it. The month before, Prudie's beautician had removed most of her eyebrows; it gave her a look of steady surprise. We couldn't wait for this to go away."Sans pa.s.sion, amour n'est rien,"

Prudie said.

"Apres moi, le deluge,"Bernadette answered, just so Prudie's words wouldn't fall into a silence that might be mistaken for chilly. Bernadette was really too kind sometimes.

Nothing smelly outside. Sahara came away from the screen door. She leaned into Jocelyn, sighing. Then she circled three times, sank, and rested her chin on the gamy toe of Jocelyn's shoe. She was relaxed but alert. Nothing would get to Jocelyn that didn't go through Sahara first.

"If I may." Grigg cleared his throat, held up his hand. "One thing I notice aboutEmma is that there's a sense of menace." He counted off on his fingers. He wore no ring. "The violent Gyp-sies. The unexplained pilferings. Jane Fairfax's boat accident. All Mr. Woodhouse's worries. There's a sense of threat hovering on the edges. Casting its shadow."

Prudie spoke quickly and decisively. "But Austen's whole point is that none of those things is real. There is no real threat."

"I'm afraid you've missed the whole point," said Allegra.

Grigg said nothing further. His eyelashes dropped to his cheeks, making his expression hard to read. It fell to Jocelyn as hostess to change the subject.

"I read once that theEmma plot, the humbling of a pretty, self-satisfied girl, is the most popular plot of all time. I think it was Robertson Davies who said so. That this was the one story every-one was bound to enjoy." * * *