Smart Thoughts on Book Clubs

Tip of the hat to CB for pointing me in the direction of this piece by novelist Rachel Cusk in The Guardian about joining a book club. CB also rightly marveled at the fact that something of this length and intelligence ran in a newspaper. Ladies and gentlemen, the United Kingdom.

One of my favorite parts:

It seemed that next time we were to do Chekhov. William Boyd had written an article in this newspaper on the history of the short-story form and made the stunning claim that Chekhov was the best. It was all slightly implausible. There he was, dead, Russian, and yet, apparently, the best. I was curious to see what the book group would make of Chekhov. I believed he would transform them. I believed in his power of verisimilitude, of true emotion, of human understanding. I believed in his art. I imagined the serious book group convening in a new and luminous spirit, reborn, having felt the incomparable benediction of recognition, of the vanquishing of time by truth. I imagined them becoming ... serious.

At the next meeting the mood was glum. The ladies filed in despondently, holding their grim copies of Chekhov as people hold unsavoury things when they can't find anywhere to dispose of them. There were nuts and crisps and chilly little glasses of red wine, which people sampled erratically, undecidedly, as though, now the solace of reading had been contaminated, their generalised need for consolation had itself become strange and unfamiliar. So, someone said. So. There was a great sighing, a great wearied exhalation.

After a silence someone else finally blurted out that she couldn't get on with Chekhov - was that his name? - at all. Not at all. Sombrely everyone else owned up. It was just awful. They could hardly get beyond the first page. It wasn't that it was difficult, just that it was so - unenjoyable. Depressing. Boring. This Chekhov, whom everyone made such a fuss about. I just think he's not a very nice person, one lady said. Silence. Much staring at the carpet and shaking of heads. Oh, for heaven's sake, I said. What do you want? Lies? More books about time-travel, or some past that never existed, or people who grow wings and fly around the place? Or happy endings, or characters the like of which you'll never meet in your life, or books about things that never actually happen to people? The point about Chekhov, I said, to the blank circle of their faces; the point about Chekhov ... For 10 minutes or more I descanted on the point about Chekhov. No one interrupted me. No one said anything at all. At the end they understood that I liked Chekhov rather a lot. My claim that he was the father of modern fiction raised a few suspicious eyebrows. Then someone brought up the subject of Christmas, which was a few weeks away.