The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  The man had turned toward her. He was a large man with a full beard and a small scotch. He looked like a bear, but good-humored, which real bears never, ever look. Jocelyn was guessing he was a basset breeder; there wasn’t a more agreeable group in the world than the basset contingent. She herself had only recently learned to love the bassets, and it was a point of secret shame that it had taken so long. Everyone else seemed to fall in love with them so effortlessly.

  “Mostly I was offended by the invertebrates,” the bear man said. “We are not crustaceans. The same rules do not apply.”

  Now Jocelyn was sorry she’d left the demonstration early. How much gratitude could a crustacean express? And if one did, well, she’d certainly want to be there to see it. “He did a crustacean?” she asked. Wistfully.

  “Which of his books have you read?”

  “I haven’t read his books.”

  “Oh my God! You should read his books,” the man told her. “I complain, sure, but I’m a huge fan. You really should read his books.”

  “Well, you’re huge. You got that part right.” The voice was tiny, a gnat in Jocelyn’s ear. She turned and found Roberta Reinicker’s face hovering above her, her brother Tad just behind. The Reinickers had a kennel in Fresno and a coquettish Ridgeback named Beauty in whom Jocelyn was periodically interested. Beauty had good papers and a good confirmation. A sweet if unsteady disposition. She gave her heart to whoever was closest. In a dog, this was a pretty nice trait.

  “Scoot over,” Roberta said, taking half of Jocelyn’s stool by pressing her hard into the counter. Roberta was a frosted blond in her late thirties. Tad was older and not so pretty. He leaned past Jocelyn to order. “I have a new car,” he told her. He raised his eyebrows significantly and tried to wait for the punch line. He failed. “A Lexus. Great mileage. Beautiful seats. The engine—like butter churning.”

  “How nice,” Jocelyn said. He was still hovering. If Jocelyn looked straight up she’d see the soft white froglike skin on the bottom of his chin. This wasn’t a view one often got, and a very good thing, too.

  “ ‘Nice’!” Tad shook his head; his chin went right and left and right and left. “I hope you can do better than ‘nice.’ It’s a Lexus.”

  “Very nice,” Jocelyn offered. A Lexus was, by all accounts, a very nice car. Jocelyn had never heard otherwise.

  “Used, of course. I got a great deal. I could take you for a spin later. You’ve never had such a smooth ride.”

  While he was talking, Roberta’s gnat voice came into Jocelyn’s ear again. “What a bunch of freaks,” Roberta said.

  Jocelyn did not approve of calling people freaks. Nor did she think the people in the bar looked particularly freakish. There’d been a Klingon, an elf or two down in the lobby, but apparently the aliens weren’t drinking. Too bad. A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, right,” Roberta said. Conspiratorially.

  “So which authors do you like?” the bear man asked Roberta.

  “Oh!” Roberta said. “No! I don’t read science fiction. Not ever.” And then, into Jocelyn’s ear, “My God! He thinks I’m one of them.”

  My God. The bear man was a science fiction fan, not a basset breeder. So what, Jocelyn wondered, had she and he been talking about? How had crustaceans made their way into the conversation?

  And surely he couldn’t hear Roberta over the other noise in the bar, but he could see the whispering. Jocelyn was mortified by her own mistake and Roberta’s bad manners.

  “Really?” she asked Roberta, loud enough for the bear man to hear. “Never? That seems a bit small-minded. I love a good science fiction novel, myself.”

  “Whom do you read?” the bear man asked.

  Jocelyn took another gulp, set her glass down, crossed her arms. This accomplished nothing. Roberta, Tad, and the bear man watched her intently. She closed her eyes, which did make them disappear, but not usefully so.

  Think, she told herself. Surely she knew the name of one science fiction writer. Who was that dinosaur guy? Michael something.

  “Ursula Le Guin. Connie Willis? Nancy Kress?” Grigg had come up while she had her eyes closed, was standing just behind Roberta. “Am I right?” he asked. “You look like a woman of impeccable taste.”

  “I think you must be psychic,” she said.

  Tad told them all what a really good book was (nonfiction and with boats—The Perfect Storm), and also what wasn’t a good book (anything with talking fucking trees like The Lord of the Rings). It turned out Tad had never actually read either one. He’d seen the movies. This made the bear man so mad he spilled his scotch into his beard.

  Jocelyn went to use the bathroom, and when she came back both Grigg and the bear man were gone. Roberta had saved the bear man’s chair for her, and Tad had gotten her a second dirty martini, which was nice of him, though she didn’t want it and he might have asked first. And of course, the stool Roberta was on was actually Jocelyn’s, not that Jocelyn preferred one to the other. Just that she wouldn’t have needed anybody to save her a seat if her own seat hadn’t been taken in the first place.

  “I managed to get rid of them,” Tad said. He was shouting so as to be heard. “I told them we were going for a spin in my new Lexus.”

  “But not me,” Roberta said. “I’m exhausted. Honestly, I’m so tired I’m not even sure I can make it to bed.” She illustrated the point by drooping prettily over the bar.

  “What made you think I wanted to get rid of them?” Jocelyn asked Tad. Really, what an annoying man! She hated his Lexus. She was beginning to hate Beauty. The prettiest dog you could ever imagine, but did Jocelyn want that “Chase me, chase me” gene in the Serengeti pool?

  “I can tell when you’re just being polite,” Tad said, proving, if he only knew it, how much he couldn’t. He winked.

  Jocelyn told him politely that she had an early panel to get to the next morning and was going to have to call it a night. (“Me too,” Roberta said.) Jocelyn thanked Tad for her untouched drink, insisted on paying for it, and left.

  She looked for Grigg and the bear man for a while. She was afraid it might have looked collusive—she disappears to the bathroom; Tad gets rid of the unwelcome guests. However Tad had handled their dismissal, it couldn’t have been delicately done. She wanted to say she’d been unaware of it. She wanted to say she’d been enjoying their company. This would be awkward, no doubt, and unpersuasive, but was true; she had that on her side.

  She saw a notice in the elevator for a book-launch party on the sixth floor, so she went down and walked by, pretending she had a room on that floor and was about her innocent business there. The party suite was so packed that people had spilled out into the hall. The vampire girls were seated among them. Two of them were visible, drinking red wine and flicking Cheetos at each other. The other had her arms crossed behind the neck of a young man and her tongue in his mouth. He had his hands on her butt, so he was visible, but Jocelyn wasn’t sure about the girl. She would have to ask Grigg when she found him: Are you invisible if your arms are crossed but there is a skinny, caped guy inside them, sucking your face?

  Jocelyn picked her way through the hall, past the door of the suite. Lights strobed inside; there was music and dancing. The party pulsed. She was surprised to see Roberta, shaking her hair and her ass, moving in the intermittent light from attitude to attitude. Now her hands were on her hips. Now she snaked to one side. Now she did a hip-hop dip. Jocelyn couldn’t see her partner, the room was too crowded.

  Jocelyn gave up. She went back to her room, called Sylvia and related the whole annoying evening.

  “Which one is Tad?” Sylvia asked. “Is he the one who’s always saying ‘Good girl,’ to everyone?” But he wasn’t, Sylvia was thinking of Burtie Chambers. Sylvia liked the idea that you could disappear by crossing your arms, though. “God, wouldn’t that be great!” she said. “Danie
l will love it. He’s always wishing he could disappear.”

  Jocelyn didn’t see Grigg again until the evening of the next day. “I was afraid you’d left,” she said, “and I wanted to apologize for last night.”

  He was kind enough to cut her off. “I got you something in the dealer’s room,” he told her. He fished through his convention bag and pulled out two paperbacks—The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven. “Give these a try.”

  Jocelyn took the books. She was touched by the gift, though he was also, she thought, making fun of her, because there was Le Guin, the same author she’d claimed, with his guidance, to read and love. Plus, Grigg was a little too eager, obviously excited to have found a reader so utterly ignorant. “These are classics in the field,” he said. “And amazing books.”

  She thanked him, though she really hadn’t planned to begin reading science fiction and still didn’t. Perhaps some of this came through. “I really think you’ll love them,” Grigg said. And then, “I’m perfectly willing to be directed, too. You tell me what I should be reading, and I promise to read it.”

  Jocelyn liked nothing so much as telling people what to do. “I’ll make you a list,” she said.

  In fact she forgot all about Grigg until he e-mailed her in late January. “Remember me?” the e-mail asked. “We met at the convention in Stockton. I’m out of work now and I’m relocating to your neck of the woods. Since you’re the only person I know up there, I’m hoping for an insider’s view. Where to get my hair cut. Which dentist to see. Could we have a cup of coffee and you make me one of your famous lists?”

  If he hadn’t had such an odd name Jocelyn probably would have had trouble bringing Grigg to mind. She remembered now how agreeable she’d found him. Hadn’t he given her a book or two? She really should dig those out and read them.

  She kept his e-mail on the top of her queue for a few days. But a charming, unattached (she assumed) man was too valuable to throw away just because you had no immediate use for him. She e-mailed him back and agreed to coffee.

  When she began putting the book club together, she e-mailed him again. “I remember you as a great reader,” she wrote. “We’ll be doing the completed works of Jane Austen. Are you interested?”

  “Count me in,” Grigg answered. “I’ve been meaning to read Austen for a long time now.”

  “You’ll probably be the only boy,” Jocelyn warned him. “With some fierce older women. I can’t promise they won’t give you a hard time now and then.”

  “Better and better,” Grigg said. “In fact, I wouldn’t be comfortable any other way.”

  Jocelyn didn’t tell us any of this, because it was none of our business and anyway we were there to discuss Jane Austen. All she did was turn to Sylvia. “You remember. Stockton. I saw the Reinickers there and they annoyed me so much? I’d agreed to breed Thembe with Beauty and then I backed out?”

  “Is Mr. Reinicker the one who’s always saying ‘Good girl,’ to everyone?” Sylvia asked.

  Grigg had put the dining room chairs out on the back porch, it being such a perfect evening. There was one papasan chair, with pin-striped cushions, which Jocelyn made Bernadette take. The rest of us sat in a circle around her, the queen and her court.

  We could hear the hum of traffic on University Avenue. A large black cat with a small head, very sphinxlike, wound around our legs and then made for Jocelyn’s lap. All cats do this, as she is allergic.

  “Max,” Grigg told us. “Short for Maximum Cat.” He hoisted Max with two hands and set him inside, where he paced the windowsill, weaving through the African violets, watching us with his golden eyes, clearly wishing us ill. Of all the cats that come through the pounds, all-black males are the hardest to place, and Jocelyn heartily approved of anyone who had one. Had Jocelyn known about the cat? It might explain Grigg’s invitation into the group, something we had ceased to mind, since Grigg was very nice, but we had never settled.

  Grigg told us how he’d lost a tech-support job in San Jose when the dot-coms crashed. He’d gotten a severance package and come to the Valley, where housing cost less and his money would last longer. He was working in a temp job at the university, part of the secretarial pool. He was based in the linguistics department.

  He’d recently been told that the job was his for as long as he liked. His computer skills had everyone pretty excited. He spent his days recovering lost data, chasing down viruses, creating PowerPoint presentations of this and that. He seldom got to his real work, but no one complained; everyone was relieved to avoid the campus tech support. Apparently the campus group was some sort of elite paramilitary operation in which all information was treated as top-secret, to be doled out grudgingly and only after repeated requests. People came back from the computer lab looking as if they’d made a visit to the Godfather. Grigg’s pay was less than it had been, but people were always bringing him cookies.

  Plus, he was thinking of writing a roman à clef. The linguists were a pretty weird bunch.

  We paused for a moment, all of us wishing that Prudie was there to hear Grigg say “roman à clef.”

  Grigg had laid out a green salad made with dried cranberries and candied walnuts. There were the cheeses and pepper crackers. Several dips, including artichoke. A lovely white wine from the Bonny Doon vineyard. It was a respectable spread, although the cheese plate had a snow scene and was obviously meant to be used only at Christmas and probably for cookies. And the wine-glasses didn’t match.

  “Why did you say you like Northanger Abbey best of all Austen’s books?” Jocelyn asked Grigg. She had the tone of someone calling us to order. And also of someone keeping an open mind. Only Jocelyn could have managed to convey both.

  “I just love how it’s all about reading novels. Who’s a heroine, what’s an adventure? Austen poses these questions very directly. There’s something very pomo going on there.”

  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.

  “It makes sense that Austen would be asking these questions,” Jocelyn said, “since Northanger Abbey is her first.”

  “I thought Northanger Abbey was one of her last,” Grigg said. He was rocking on the back legs of his chair, but it was his chair, after all, and none of our business. “I thought Sense and Sensibility was first.”

  “First published. But Northanger Abbey was the first sold to a publisher.”

  Our opinion of the Gramercy edition of the novels sank even further. Was it possible it didn’t make this clear? Or had Grigg simply neglected to read the foreword? Surely there was a foreword.

  “Austen doesn’t always seem to admire reading,” Sylvia said. “In Northanger Abbey she accuses other novelists of denigrating novels in their novels, but isn’t she doing the same thing?”

  “No, she defends novels. But she’s definitely having a go at readers,” Allegra said. “She makes Catherine quite ridiculous, going on and on about The Mysteries of Udolpho. Thinking life is really like that. Not that that’s the best part of the book. Actually that part’s kind of lame.”

  Allegra was always pointing out what wasn’t the best part of the book. We were a bit tired of it, truth to tell.

  Grigg rocked forward, the front legs of his chair hitting the porch with a smack. “But she doesn’t much care for people who haven’t read it, either. Or at least those who pretend not to have read it. And while she makes fun of Catherine for being so influenced by Udolpho, you have to say that Northanger Abbey is completely under that same influence. Austen’s imitated the structure, made all her choices in opposition to that original text. Assumes everyone has read it.”

  “You’ve read The Mysteries of Udolpho?” Allegra asked.

  “Black veils and Laurentina’s skeleton? You bet. Didn’t you think it sounded g
ood?”

  We had not. We’d thought it sounded overheated, overdone, old-fashionedly lurid. We’d thought it sounded ridiculous.

  Actually it hadn’t occurred to any of us to read it. Some of us hadn’t even realized it was a real book.

  The sun had finally set and all the brightness fallen from the air. There was a tiny moon like a fingernail paring. Gauzy clouds floated over it. A jay landed on the sill outside the kitchen and Maximum Cat wept to be let back out. During the bedlam Grigg went and got our dessert.

  He’d made a cheesecake. He took it to Bernadette, who cut it and passed the slices around. The crust was obviously store-bought. Good, though. We had all used store-bought crusts ourselves in times of need. Nothing wrong with store-bought.

  Bernadette began to give us her opinion on whether Jane Austen admired people who read books or whether she didn’t. Eventually we understood that Bernadette didn’t have an opinion on this. She felt there was a great deal of conflicting data.

  We sat for a bit, pretending to mull over what she’d said. It didn’t seem polite to move right on when she’d taken so long to say it. She’d laid her glasses with their great lump of paper clips and masking tape by her plate, and she had that stripped, eye-bagged look people who usually wear glasses get when they take their glasses off.

  We talked briefly about moving inside for coffee. The uncushioned chairs weren’t comfortable, but Grigg didn’t seem to have other chairs; we’d just be taking them with us. It wasn’t cold. The city mosquito abatement program had done its work and nothing was eating us. We stayed where we were. A motorcycle coughed and spit its way down University Avenue.

  “I think Catherine is a charming character,” said Bernadette. “Where’s the harm in a good heart and an active imagination? And Tilney is a genuine wit. He has more sparkle than Edward in Sense and Sensibility or Edmund in Mansfield Park. Catherine’s not my very favorite of the Austen heroines, but Tilney’s my favorite hero.” She directed this at Allegra, who hadn’t yet spoken on the subject, but Bernadette was guessing what she thought. And bull’s-eye, too.