I've only had a couple of video chat meetings during the ongoing unpleasantness, which is disappointing in that I was looking forward to some Jetsons-style communicating. I'm like a Third World child with technology, simultaneously fascinated and over-awed. But though I've had FaceTime on my phone for years, I've never used it successfully.
But the other night I got to see one of these digital hang-out things work really well. Karen's book club met on our dining room table. I sat in the background, watching a game from the 2011 World Series on my iPad. But I could overhear a lot of the conversation, and I was impressed.
Not only with the technology, which worked, as they say, "swell," but with the quality of the discussion I overheard and the seriousness with which these 10 women attacked the material at hand. They had all obviously read the book — The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) — and had long thoughts on it that they expressed succinctly and with the confidence of TED talkers. They analyzed the book's themes, talked about the characters' co-dependencies and assayed the author's style as I poured Karen a glass of wine.
They took the book seriously, while enjoying libations of their choice.
While I have spoken to a few book clubs, I have never been in one. Mostly that's because I'm too jealous of my time. But secondly, it's because I've always thought that a book club was more or less an excuse to have a cocktail party, and you don't need an excuse to have a cocktail party. And thirdly, though I don't exactly know why this is, book clubs seem to segregate along gender lines. You know, the menfolk go into the library and smoke stinky cigars, the girls go into the powder room to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists.
Check that — maybe I do know why that is.
I have a lot of intelligent male friends. We are not at all as we are generally depicted in the media. Some — heck, most — of my male friends read books. Some write them. But I could not imagine being in a book club with most of them.
Because we wouldn't talk about the book. Because we'd talk about sports or politics or what the girls in the powder room could possibly be talking about before we got around to talking about the books. And most of that would consist of us wondering how autobiographical the book is or isn't and how large an advance the author secured and whether or not a given member of the group could beat Tom Brady at golf.
I can just imagine the sort of books we'd assign each other. We'd try to hurt each other with our selections. "I'll see your Finnegan's Wake, and raise you The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. Oh hell, not Gravity's Rainbow." (It's all good fun until someone loses an eye or Atlas Shrugged gets invoked.)
So no book clubs for me. Not just yet.
Though if we're still locked down in September, maybe. As we have all found out recently, no one can predict the future. By September, the mole people may have come out of the sewers to enslave us all. (I, for one, welcome our new furry overlords.)
In the meantime, we muddle through. I go into the office on Sunday mornings now, and most publishers have slowed or suspended their mailing of physical review copies. While I still get offered a lot of advance copies via electronic means, my preference is to read physical books whenever possible. So lately I've dipped into the novels of John Sandford (real name John Camp, when the pseudonym outsells the work you do under your own name you become the pseudonym), simply because I set aside a few of them for our neighborhood Free Little Library. All I knew about them was that they were popular.
They were on hand, so during the lockdown, I've burned through the two most recent books in his Lucas Davenport series, 2019's Neon Prey and 2020's Masked Prey, and his 2019 Virgil Flowers novel Bloody Genius. I liked them. They are basically formula cop procedurals, with interesting (male) characters and well-observed technical details (he's good on guns and music) that point to the author's roots as a journalist.
So I'm a John Sandford fan too, in the same mild way I am a fan of Lee Child (another pseudonym that has overtaken its host) and James Bond. I don't take any of them too seriously, but I'm not ashamed of them either.
And maybe, if the mole people let us have reading lamps and Kindles, I can get together with my buddies and we can form a book club devoted to the murder books of famous pseudonyms. That would help alleviate the tedium.
Meanwhile, Karen and the girls are taking on Elie Wiesel's Night.
Email:
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Style on 06/07/2020