As a bonus feature to her fifth novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler throws in a sampling of two centuries' worth of responses to Jane Austen, using sources ranging from Austen's mother to J.K. Rowling. It's striking how so many could find so much in, as Martin Amis put it, "six samey novels about middle-class provincials." But, its many other charms aside, The Jane Austen Book Club makes a striking case for its subject's insight into humankind's eternally unchanging desires. Austen's provincial middle-class society could probably be reconstructed simply from the details of her novels, with their attention to mores and social conventions. But carrying out those mores and social conventions are characters whose motives transcend their specific time and place, and Fowler lets them resurface in a reading group of five women and one man making their way through the Austen oeuvre.
At least, that's one way of looking at it. Fowler's opening line—"Each of us has a private Austen"—clearly establishes Austen's work as an interpretive free-for-all. Each of the Californians in her group brings a different Austen to their meetings, and, in fine Austen tradition, at least some of them leave with their perceptions changed.
Using the group's monthly meetings as an organizational device, Fowler gives each chapter over to a different novel, and as her characters engage in witty conversation, Fowler converses with Austen's work itself, letting the themes of the novel at hand echo through the narrative to memorable effect. Naming a character "Prudie" probably puts too fine a point on it, but playing out a miniature Pride And Prejudice with the prejudice tied to a character's science-fiction reading habits plays out brilliantly.
While it wouldn't hurt to read Fowler's novel after coming off an Austen binge, that's hardly necessary. Like her hero, Fowler has a gift for lively characters, dry observations, and compelling plots in which seemingly insignificant details build to moments of tremendous importance. The group's axis, Jocelyn, derives from Emma both an urge for matchmaking and an inability to look to her own happiness. Fowler turns her into a dog breeder. It's an easy, funny gag, but the author goes on to make her, and each of The Jane Austen Book Club's characters, so fully developed and endearing that it's impossible not to hope they get an Austen-inspired happy ending, even while the book group keeps returning to the question of whether such endings exist. The Jane Austen Book Club showcases some smart postmodern devices, but sometimes the compelling novel that houses them makes them easy to overlook.