Once such topical preliminaries as ”Batman Returns,” Marshall Field makeovers and Annette Bening`s chestlift were out of the way, members of the klatch turned their attention to the main event: Toni Morrison`s ”Jazz.”
While working critics had little but praise for Morrison`s novel, the absentee author was about to face a hipper, tougher and more discriminating audience, one far less swayed by literary politics and fashion.
Michelle weighed in first, with a declaration of passionate love for
”Jazz,” an opinion that was quickly seconded by Ruth. Among the eight people gathered in the living room of the Near North Side apartment, however, these two Morrison boosters turned out to be a vocal minority.
Carollina was mildly disappointed in ”Jazz,” but more vigorous dissent came from Mark and Therese, neither of whom was awed by Morrison`s novel nor intimidated by her Pulitzer Prize and other superliterary credentials. Mark found the novel ”overwhelmingly showoffy . . . derivative bs,” while Therese asserted: ”For the record, I didn`t hate this book. It was just tiresome.”
For nearly an hour, they sparred and bantered, parried and quipped, back and forth, pro and con, buttressing their arguments and counterarguments with references to William Faulkner, Leon Forrest and Umberto Eco. Then Michelle interrupted her observation about ”self-conscious postmodernism” to inquire of the hostess, ”Is it OK if the cat`s in the salsa?”
Welcome to the club-or to one of the more animated, informal
and youthful variations on the book club, as it unfolded one recent evening. Every month, the members, all friends and colleagues, meet to dissect a book, preferably a paperback, whether it`s the latest Morrison, Oscar Hijuelos or Tom Robbins, or else something from the library of classics, such as E.M. Forster`s ”Howards End” (whose immediate appeal came from its release as a movie).
In an age of electronic living rooms, where the fireplace has been displaced by the entertainment center and the bookshelves are stockpiled with videocassettes, a rap group devoted to literature might seem as quaint and anachronistic as the stereoscope, the dime novel or the sewing bee, the last of which book clubs do resemble in certain respects.
And yet from all the evidence, book clubs are flourishing. According to Sandra Brown, co-founder of Reading Women, a bimonthly, eight-page newsletter that provides brief reviews of current books for libraries, schools and clubs, there are thousands of such groups in the Chicago area, most of them centered in the living or family rooms of members` homes and modeled on the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the `20s.
As the title of Brown`s tipsheet would further indicate, most book clubs are almost exclusively a female dominion.
”Women tend to relate in a very personal manner,” says Brown, who started her Winnetka newsletter with Rachel Jacobsohn and Katherine Gurvey.
”When men do belong to book groups, they usually discuss things like military history, mysteries or spy stories. Very rarely do men get into the kind of fiction that delves into human emotion, because they really are not used to dealing with that.”
Women`s preserve
If Brown is right, that would make the Near North book club that recently discussed ”Jazz” even more of an aberration. Besides the relative youth of its members, most of whom are in their 20s, the group is evenly divided between women and men (with the males no less articulate than the females, even if two were disqualified from the debate because they hadn`t bothered to read Morrison`s novel).
Without men, the group would be missing a vital element, says Michelle Green, a graduate student in English whose husband, Paul, also belongs.
”There`s not a big difference in how we read. In general, the way we feel about books rarely breaks down along gender lines. There`s never been a book that all men liked and all women hated, and vice versa. But it`s interesting to get a viewpoint from men about male characters in women`s novels.
”And,” Green adds, ”if it were all women, we might be more inclined to keep it on an intellectual level. It wouldn`t be nearly as much fun.”
In accepting men as their literary equals, however, Green and her female compatriots are the rare exceptions.
”It didn`t even occur to us to include men,” says Peggy Slater, recalling how she and Katherine Nicklin started a North Shore book club 11 years ago. ”If a man had come in early as a true equal, it might have worked. But this far down the road, I don`t see it.”
Friends and neighbors in Winnetka, with young children, Nicklin and Slater had frequently traded books. ”I enjoyed talking to her so much about the things we read,” Slater says of the club`s origins. ”It was so much more rewarding than discussions that are limited to typical domestic circumstances, like current events or kids or spousal relationships.”
From the moment they recruited a half-dozen friends who shared their literary tastes, from Highland Park to Evanston, and chose their first book
(Toni Morrison`s ”Song of Solomon”), the club was founded on the unspoken premise that it was to be exclusively a women`s preserve, which is how it has remained. ”We cherish our little time together,” says Nicklin.
”We do have parties with our husbands,” she continues, but the group has stopped short of inviting them to participate. ”I don`t think they`d choose the same type of books we do.”
An intellectual exchange
Because men are a missing ingredient doesn`t mean that it`s a feminist club, dedicated exclusively to women`s books. ”That was an issue raised the first time we got together,” says Slater. ”And there was a pretty strong feeling that we didn`t want to be limited in our orientation.”
The North Shore club has read its share of books by female and feminist authors, from Jane Austen to Kate Chopin to Maya Angelou. But they`ve hardly been timid about venturing onto male terrain, Nicklin says, citing novels by Jerzy Kosinski, Mark Helprin, Italo Calvino and John Fowles, among the more than 100 they`ve read over the last decade.
Every summer, members put together a reading list for the coming year, subject to modification. At their two-hour sessions one Wednesday morning a month, one person is assigned to gather biographical and critical material so she can guide the next discussion.
With each of the nine participants not only encouraged but expected to sound off, strong disagreements can develop, Nicklin says. ”But to me, that`s what`s so wonderful and thought-provoking. Nobody holds back their true viewpoints. We know one another very well, our opinions are valued and respected. It`s become a truly intellectual exchange.”
Their democratic methods in selecting novels can turn up an occasional bummer, or what Slater diplomatically calls a book that is ”not a great discussion stimulator,” such as Ellen Gilchrist`s ”The Annunciation.”
”It`s hard to predict which books are going to produce the best discussions,” Slater adds. ”I loved `Sometimes a Great Notion` by Ken Kesey; others thought it was terrible. Katherine liked `The Master of Go` (by Yasunari Kawabata), but nobody else did. But that`s OK. We wanted this to be a diverse group.”
Shared adventures
Group pressure has brought some serendipitous discoveries, Slater says, namely George Eliot`s ”Middlemarch,” a novel that several members were reluctant to read. ”I wouldn`t have gotten through the first 100 pages if I didn`t know I was going to be discussing it. By the time I finished, I loved it.”
Almost if not equally as important as the reading list are the interpersonal aspects of their shared adventures in literature. ”We were all friends before,” Slater says. ”But this has carried friendship to another level.”
Although friendship, not feminism, may be the crucial point, the Winnetka book club affirms an observation made by Sandra Brown, editor of Reading Women, when she calls book clubs an evolutionary step forward in the women`s movement, an intellectual extension of consciousness-raising groups. ”It`s a very healthy, normative way to look into yourself and your life, by reading and understanding the great authors.”
While most such groups tend to be loosely, not to say chaotically, organized, the two monthly book clubs that Marvin Mirsky oversees-one in the Indiana Dunes, the other in Highland Park-are models of semiformality and academic rigor, and no wonder. Mirsky is a professor of humanities at the University of Chicago who was persuaded to enlist as leader of a book club 10 years ago.
”I find them very gratifying,” says Mirsky of his extracurricular sessions, explaining that participants are inclined to be far more self-motivated than his U. of C. students. ”These are very serious, committed people. They don`t just come along for the ride.”
Consciousness raising
They`re also mature people, bringing to the meetings a ”whole world of background experience, so obviously one can speak on a more sophisticated level,” Mirsky says. Because ”it`s not a Book-of-the-Month Club type of group,” Mirsky expects members to tackle such intimidating works as Kazuo Ishiguro`s ”The Remains of the Day,” Naguib Mahfouz`s ”Palace Walk” and Salman Rushdie`s ”The Satanic Verses,” along with such ”lighter” fare as Henry James` ”The Americans” and Lewis Carroll`s ”Alice in Wonderland.”
Although his groups are composed entirely of women (who each pay $125 for a year`s enrollment), Mirsky makes no concessions to what might be considered their feminine sensibilities, assigning books about Vietnam (Larry Heinemann`s ”Paco`s Story”) and others that ”some people might consider pornographic,” such as Mario Vargas Llosa`s ”In Praise of the Stepmother.” While raising members` consciousness to male writers, Mirsky has also raised his own on female writers. ”Over the years, I have quite consciously attempted to choose more women authors,” he says, naming Bobbie Anne Mason as one of the better contemporary novelists. ”It may be that there are more and more good ones, or it may be that I`ve gone out of my way to see if there are more women worth reading.”
All the books on the reading list are chosen by Mirsky, who doesn`t simply lecture to members but aggressively solicits their participation. On that and other scores, he has done an ”extraordinary” job, according to Fay Sawyier, the former head of the philosophy department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, now a professor at Indiana University Northwest.
”He encourages us to speak up, and he picks very interesting novels that I wouldn`t read otherwise,” says Sawyier, a member of the Dunes faction.
So important have the meetings become to Marianne Gosswiller, another of Mirsky`s acolytes, that she insists her husband, Richard, schedule their vacations around them (even though he`s excluded from the club). ”They`re so fulfilling I wouldn`t want to miss one,” says Gosswiller.
`A dying art`
While buoyed by such devoted readers, Mirsky can`t help but wish their enthusiasm would extend closer to home. ”My general impression is that reading is a dying art,” he says. ”I have three kids who I could never get to read a book, and they don`t read now. And a fair number of students at the university don`t really read.”
Mirsky might have been more upbeat if he`d witnessed the recent club meeting for Toni Morrison`s ”Jazz.” Explaining her presence, during a break for pizza, soft drinks, pear charlotte and coffee, Michelle Green says: ”I really wanted to talk about contemporary books with people who did not have an academic stake in them. . . . This a way of way of combining a social and a literary experience.”
For Carollina Song, the book club means time ”to be close to friends who have busy schedules, overextended lives. Books give us a reason for coming together. And people`s responses to books are so individual. They tell you so much about them, what their values are. . . . It`s important to be able to share that with a group of friends, along with all the food and gossip.”
———-
For more information about Reading Women, write Box 296, Winnetka, Ill. 60093, or call 708-432-8832.
