Caring & Sharing

Stephen Metcalf brings the Slate discussion of The Jane Austen Book Club to a close with an important question followed by a fundamental complaint:

[I]sn't the entreaty behind any book's cutesy po-mo trickery, whether it's by Joyce or Dave Eggers or Karen Joy Fowler, "Don't judge a book by the book"? If there weren't a human story at the core of Ulysses (two really, the stories of Bloom and Stephen), would we put up with its narrative chicanery and endless verbal legerdemain? Fowler's ability to wink coyly for me never overcame how little emotional, sexual, or financial danger she put her characters in. And she gains no shelter by invoking Austen, on this or any score. The Austen whose feelings, like Shakespeare's, we supposedly never can fully divine still wrote very definite sentences like, "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character."

He then suggests that part of the power of good fiction, especially novels, "starts with feeling the likelihood... of no connection whatsoever." Which is to say, that feeling you get when you slowly start to realize that this story about other people in another world still, somehow, speaks to your most intimate concerns in a way that profoundly disturbs (in the sense of upsetting your complacency, not necessarily in the sense of offending). I don't know that I agree with him and Meghan O'Rourke fully about TJABC; part of it may be a case of de gustibus and all that. But even in disliking the novel, they've given me, and presumably other fans, an opportunity to think about it again carefully, to turn the story over in our minds and see if we can understand where they're coming from. In some cases, I can; in others, we'll have to simply agree to disagree.