From Publishers Weekly
Fowler's fifth novel (after PEN/Faulkner award finalist Sister Noon) features her trademark sly wit, quirky characters and digressive storytelling, but with a difference: this one is book clubâ€"ready, complete with mock-serious "questions for discussion" posed by the characters themselves. The plot here is deceptively slim: five women and one enigmatic man meet on a monthly basis to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, one at a time. As they debate Marianne's marriage to Brandon and whether or not Charlotte Lucas is gay, they reveal nothing so much as their own "private Austen(s)": to Jocelyn, an unmarried "control freak," the author is the consummate matchmaker; to solitary Prudie, she's the supreme ironist; to the lesbian Allegra, she's the disingenuous defender of the social caste system, etc. The book club's conversation is variously astute, petty, obvious and funny, but no one stays with it: the characters nibble high-calorie desserts, sip margaritas and drift off into personal reveries. Like Austen, Fowler is a subversive wit and a wise observer of human interaction of all stripes ("All parents wanted an impossible life for their childrenâ€"happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind"). She's also an enthusiastic consumer of popular culture, offsetting the heady literary chat with references to Sex and the City, Linux and "a rug that many of us recognized from the Sundance catalog." Though the 21 pages of quotations from Austen's family, friends and critics seems excessive, the novelty of Fowler's package should attract significant numbers of book club members, not to mention the legions of Janeites craving good company and happy endings. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Five women and one man meet periodically to discuss the work of (arguably) the greatest novelist in English. Six people, one for each Jane Austen title. It is California, a hot summer in the Central Valley early in the 21st century, and these are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them hurting in different ways, all of them mixed up about love. Sylvia's husband, Daniel, has left her after 32 years and three children. Jocelyn, her best friend, never married and now focuses on breeding dogs. Prudie is a French teacher in her late twenties, in possession of a worthy husband yet disoriented by persistent fantasies about sex with other men. Sixty-something Bernadette has decided that she's finally over the hill and can act a little dotty, just let herself go. The beautiful, risk-taking Allegra -- Sylvia and Daniel's lesbian daughter -- has quit speaking to her lover. And Grigg, a middle-aged science fiction fan and computer whiz, is strangely unattached. But then maybe he's gay? Together they form the "Central Valley/River City all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club." And with them Karen Joy Fowler creates a novel that is so winning, so touching, so delicately, slyly witty that admirers of Persuasion and Emma will simply sigh with happiness. On the surface, the novel looks like elegant chick-lit. (But, in some lights, so does Pride and Prejudice.) At each meeting of the club we are told about room furnishings, the hors d'oeuvres and wine served, the issues raised by that week's book -- and about turning points in the past lives of the hostess (or host) of the evening. Not surprisingly, we hear mainly about first love, youthful identity crises and middle-aged angst. But somehow Fowler invests high school crushes, the gift and burden of older sisters, a restless dreamy father, a mother's devotion, previous marriages and all the common heartaches of life with unforced pathos. As a result, the reader inevitably bonds with the group as much as its members do with each other. Meanwhile, Fowler only gradually unfolds her true plot, even as she worries us (at least a little) with possible betrayal, injury, death. But her understated humor is her real triumph. In fifth grade young Grigg is introduced to science fiction: "His father handed him a magazine. On the cover was the picture of a woman in her underwear. Her black hair flew about her face in long, loose curls. Her eyes were wide. She had enormous breasts, barely contained by a golden bra."But best of all, unbelievably best, was the thing unhooking the bra. It had eight tentacled arms and a torso shaped like a Coke can. It was blue. The look on its face -- what an artist to convey so much emotion on a creature with so few features! -- was hungry." This is certainly an apt description of nearly any issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories or Amazing in their pulp heyday. But what a lovely balance between the typicality of the illustration, the absolute rightness of the boy's response and the author's unspoken affection for both.Fowler is nowadays esteemed as a kind of magic realist in the Angela Carter mode -- see her novel Sarah Canary or the stories in Black Glass -- but longtime readers know that she comes out of science fiction. I wondered, for instance, if the bearded and bear-like but unnamed man that Jocelyn meets might be the late Damon Knight, not only a superb writer (author of the celebrated, much copied story "To Serve Man") but also a great teacher to generations of sf authors, from Gene Wolfe to Karen Joy Fowler herself. In his approach to fiction Knight valued indirection, obliquity and polish over Space Ranger shoot-em-up action. Fowler's art is of this sort -- she approaches her characters' various stories at a slant, builds toward emotional climaxes, then swerves away at the last moment. Each chapter of The Jane Austen Book Club ends decorously, mutedly, implying that the reader's intelligence can fill in the gaps. You can readily see how much she's learned from Austen about structure -- and about irony. When someone describes Northanger Abbey as "very pomo," she writes: "The rest of us weren't intimate enough with postmodernism to give it a nickname. We'd heard the word used in sentences, but its definition seemed to change with its context. We weren't troubled by this. Over at the university, people were paid to worry about such things; they'd soon have it well in hand." Every seemingly harmless sentence here is perfect, one easily overlooked put-down after another. Probably the funniest exchanges in The Jane Austen Book Club take place at a dressy banquet. The group sits with a contemporary mystery novelist named Mo Bellington, who tells them about his "magpie motif. I use them for portents as well as theme. I could explain how I do that." The hapless Bellington -- one is tempted to call him Po-Mo -- has never read Austen, is even a little unclear about what she's written. Prudie attacks. "Not five minutes earlier her mother's death had been painted across her face like one of those shattered women Picasso was so fond of. Now she looked dangerous. Now Picasso would be excusing himself, recollecting a previous engagement, backing away, leaving the building." You certainly don't need to be an Austen addict to enjoy this charming novel, though cognoscenti will pick up, say, the parallels between Elizabeth Bennet's shifting attitudes toward Darcy and the criss-cross feelings that surprise two of these contemporary readers. Giving yet another twist to her own story, Fowler also includes a series of appendices: plot summaries of Austen's novels, several pages of brief critical comment on them by various notables and finally a series of "Questions for Discussion," these last supposedly formulated by the six characters we have just read about. Postmodern indeed. In the end, though, The Jane Austen Book Club is no tricksy fictive experiment. It's about real and ordinary life. Grigg's three big sisters hardly appear, but they are just wonderful -- shrewd, resolute and fiercely protective of their baby brother, no matter what his age. Fowler can summarize parental love in a deft, neatly ambivalent aperçu: "Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children -- happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way." Even the dogs are keenly observed: "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." In the novel's final pages, as happy endings are starting to come together, Sylvia again reflects on children, and the thoughts are those of every middle-aged mother: "Sylvia found herself suddenly, desperately missing the boys. Not the grown-up boys who had jobs and wives and children or, at least, girlfriends and cell phones, but the little boys who'd played soccer and sat on her lap while she read The Hobbit to them. She remembered how Diego had decided over dinner that he could ride a two-wheeler, and made them take the training wheels off his bike that very night, how he sailed off without a single wobble. She remembered how Andy used to wake up from dreams laughing, and could never tell them why." It's just as hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From AudioFile
A California book club forms to discuss the novels of Jane Austen--what a promising literary device. As the five women and one man meet to discuss Austen's novels, they inevitably end up revealing intimacies about their own lives. Alas, with its overabundance of detail, the book becomes very like a heavy Celebration cake--so overstuffed with detail that it sags under its own weight. Kimberly Schraf reads with precision and grace, and Fowler's shrewd observations are provocative. But, ultimately, there's just too much to carry the story. L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Fowler, a captivating and good-hearted satirist, exuberantly pays homage to and matches wits with Jane Austen in her most pleasurable novel to date by portraying six irresistible Californians who meet once a month to discuss Austen's six novels. Coyly shifting points of view, Fowler subtly uses her characters' responses to Austen as entree into their poignant and often hilarious life stories. The book club is Jocelyn's idea, a fiftysomething gal who seems to prefer the company of her show dogs to men. She has known Sylvia since grade school, and even used to date Sylvia's husband, who has abruptly moved out, inspiring their beautiful, accident-prone, lesbian artist daughter, Allegra, to move back in and join the book club along with her mother. Also on board are disheveled and loquacious Bernadette; Prudie, a high-school French teacher; and Grigg, the only man. Fowler shares Austen's fascination with the power of stories, and explores the same timeless aspects of human behavior that Austen so masterfully dramatizes, while capturing with anthropological acuity and electrifying humor the oddities of our harried world. Fellow Austenites will love Fowler's fluency in the great novelist's work; every reader will relish Fowler's own ebullient comedy of manners, and who knows how many book clubs will be inspired by this charming paean to books and readers. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


BookPage, May 2004
Though Fowler takes Austen as her inspiration, she clearly possesses her own unique voice and gift for storytelling.


The New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2004
[The Jane Austen Book Club is] that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about.


San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 2004
Karen Joy Fowler deserves every success this savvy, episodic but chamois-smooth novel can bring.


Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2004
I'm instinctively wary of genetic engineering, but Karen Fowler may have produced a literary equivalent of the elusive Super Tomato.


Time Out New York, May 13-20, 2004
Fowler has fashioned a deft, witty multiple-character study and closely observed comedy of romantic manners.


Newsweek, June 14, 2004
The Jane Austen Book Club is the hot choice for book clubs around the country.


Book Description
A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California.

Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun.

Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.


About the Author
Karen Joy Fowler, A PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Black Glass: Short Fictions, and Sister Noon.

It's just as hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged. — Michael Dirda

Richard Eder - The New York Times

The thoughts are more than literary discussion. They bring out the characters and emotions of the participants along with the tensions and sympathies that flit and filter among them. Ms. Fowler has the genial notion to see in the book club ￯﾿ﾽ that newish American cultural phenomenon ￯﾿ﾽ a society resembling nothing so much as one of those sets of country gentry among which Austen constructed a social comedy where irony stiffens sentiment, and pain is a cool afterthought.

Publishers Weekly

With its many section breaks and point-of-view shifts, Fowler's newest book (following Sister Noon) poses significant challenges for a single narrator. But stage actress Schraf overcomes these obstacles with ease, her voice taking on just a touch of haughtiness for the chapters told from the "we" perspective and then switching back to an unassuming tone for the third-person sections. It may take listeners a short while to grasp the story's structure, but once they do, they'll be hopelessly snared by this witty look at the lives and loves of six people, all members of Central Valley, California's "all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club." As the members discuss Austen's stance on marriage, social status and love, the narrative meanders, touching on defining moments in the characters' lives and then drifting back to describe their current dilemmas: single, middle-aged Jocelyn has never been in love; French teacher Prudie can't stop thinking about men other than her husband; chatty Bernadette has decided to "let herself go"; warm-hearted Sylvia still loves her soon-to-be-ex-husband; emotional Allegra has left her girlfriend; and sci-fi aficionado Grigg is infatuated with someone who may not share his affection. Through subtle alterations of tone and inflection, Schraf neatly conveys the emotions and idiosyncrasies of each character, from Prudie's impossibly pretentious French asides to Bernadette's airy, endless storytelling. Playful and intelligent, this audiobook embodies the best of both the written and aural worlds. Simultaneous release with the Putnam hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 22). (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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