Micole ([info]coffeeandink) wrote,
@ 2004-06-11 12:32:00
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I like Clueless, too
Justine Larbalestier pointed me at this peculiar discussion of Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club at Slate, in which (as Justine warned me) the two reviewers alternate perception with obtuseness. They somehow conclude that Fowler is writing a romance, but fault her for failing to provide "heterosexual fire," and condemn her for being both too obvious in her observations and impossible to pin down. Stephen Metcalf, in particular, seems upset that "the book's one young, lusty firebrand, Allegra, is a lesbian[....] As if even the implied presence of active male sexuality would somehow destroy the book's effect" (apparently the couple in their fifties doesn't count) and that the only major male character has some stereotypically feminine characteristics.

I guess I'd recommend the Slate conversation as an exemplar of two clever readers spectacularly missing the point. But I'd recommend The Jane Austen Book Club as a masterpiece of affectionate irony and as a sheer delight, and I know which I'd rather read.

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[info]the_red_shoes
2004-06-11 09:54 am UTC (link)
You know, I thought about linking to that, but I thought it was much too unfair to the book (and too damned aggravating, honestly). I was stunned at some of the sniping ("indistinguishable parts of a bookish, scatterbrained, Rhodesian Ridgeback-breeding/brie-eating artsy psyche" and "The lack of a single, convincingly masculine presence in the book wreaks its worst damage on her female characters, who remain fatally unsharpened as a result" were just two of the sneers that made my eyes pop). Not to mention they give away a major narrative point (reviewers do seem happier to possibly ruin suspense for readers when discussing books they don't like).

Then again I've never trusted Meghan O'Rourke's literary judgement ever since she characterized Edna Pontellier as an embodiment of the model of angelic wifeliness, so there you are....

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[info]coffeeandink
2004-06-11 10:06 am UTC (link)
They basically criticize the book for focusing on too narrow a section of society and/or relationships by ... completely ignoring all the parts of the book that don't fit their thesis.

I also don't get how they can possibly call KJF's writing "coy" or "cutesy."

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[info]the_red_shoes
2004-06-11 11:00 am UTC (link)
I don't think I have seen those words applied to KJF's work before. Ever. I think "Jane Austen" and "book club" had something to do with that, given the horror one of the critics expressed at someone reading Anna Karenina at Oprah's suggestion instead of discovering it in splendid solitude because the most "intense" form of the novel is in its loneliness, or something v weird like that....

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(Anonymous)
2004-06-11 11:53 am UTC (link)
"The lack of a single, convincingly masculine presence in the book"

I haven't read the Karen Joy Fowler book yet, but I've seen comments like this an awful lot lately -- how there are no "real men" any more in movies or books or what have you. Am I imagining this, or have others seen this coming up elsewhere?
I'm not entirely sure what all these critics want exactly. Manual labour, inarticulacy, and rescuing helpless women all seem to come into it. Though it seems to me that this amounts a demand for _unreal_ men, men who are very unlike any of the men one meets in the real world (manual labourers or not).
I don't know. I'm a woman who enjoys writing male POV (the book I'm working on now is entirely from one male character's POV) -- interestingly, my father is a man who enjoys writing female POV. But I doubt that I write the kind of "real men" that critics seem to be after, though my male POV characters are mainly actively heterosexual and sometimes heroic in their own ways. I'm waiting for the day that someone comes after me for misrepresenting men by giving them inner lives ...

maggie h

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[info]ide_cyan
2004-06-12 12:15 am UTC (link)
"Those men who have wanted to find themselves in women's novels, as their makers and heroes, have either deluded themselves into believing that that was what they found in them or expressed disappointment or even scorn when they did not."

-- Jane Miller, Women Writing About Men, Virago, 1986, page 262.

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[info]pegkerr
2004-06-11 11:17 pm UTC (link)
Coincidence: I just finished that book today and enjoyed it very much.

I kept hoping she'd slip some references to Lady Susan into it, but she seemed to completely ignore it. Of course, on the other hand, there might have been some references in there after all that went completely over my head, because I certainly don't know Lady Susan nearly as well as Jane Austen's other work.

Have you ever read Stephanie Barron's books, murder mysteries with Jane as the detective? They're a guilty pleasure of mine; I quite like them.

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[info]coffeeandink
2004-06-19 04:33 am UTC (link)
I'm not sure I've read Lady Susan. Hmm.

I had unformed misgivings about the Barron books, so it's useful to know you recommend them.

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[info]pegkerr
2004-06-19 10:45 am UTC (link)
Oh, you must read Lady Susan! I got intrigued by Fay Wheldon's reference in Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen:
I do believe it is the battle the writer wages with the real world which provides the energy with invention. I think Jane Austen waged a particularly fearful battle, and that the world won in the end and killed her: and we are left with seven great novels. I know you've been told six. But she did write another, Lady Susan, a diverting, energetic and excellent novel, when she was very young, at about the same time she wrote the comparatively tedious and conventional Sense and Sensibility (please don't read it first) [Note: I disagree with Wheldon's narrator here myself; I love Sense and Sensibility] She put Lady Susan in a drawer. She did not attempt to have it published; nor, later, did her family. My own feeling is that they simply did not like it. They thought it unedifying and foolish, and that wicked adventuresses should not be heroines, and women writers should not invent, but only describe what they know. They had, in fact, a quite ordinary and perfectly understandable desire to keep Jane Austen respectable, ladylike and unalarming, and Lady Susan was none of these.
After reading that passage, I went on to read Lady Susan. I must read it again. She really is a deliciously wicked heroine, totally different from any other Jane Austen wrote. If you do read it, let me know what you think.

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[info]susanstinson
2004-06-12 09:21 am UTC (link)
I loved the book -- thought it was funny, subtle, skillful and astute. Karen Joy Fowler was very funny about the presence of a man in the group, and about flexibility in relation to gender, sexuality and literary taste -- about openness to unexpected affinities of all sorts, and the wry gifts of longstanding, more obvious loves and loyalities.

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