I’ve been a part of many book clubs. The most successful one was the brain fruit of my most energetic friend. We met weekly, and she’d cook lavish multi-course meals inspired by the novels we chose. But the group lost momentum, as these things do. Some members moved away. Some drifted. The club exists in a looser form now, but I haven’t made a meeting in five years.
Recently, the impulse struck again. I was at a bar with some friends, vaguely talking about an essay collection, and someone made the suggestion. Should we just start a book club? At the time, this seemed genius. Duh, we yelled, setting up a group thread. Then followed breathless ideating. We declared we did not want to be like other clubs, the ones where strict rules of engagement sparked fizzle. We valued a democratic selection process. No one would be punished for not reading. Someone observed that maybe the club we wanted was not a club so much as a way of life. And then, as if felled by this mic drop, the energy lost momentum…again.
Why are book clubs so hard to sustain? Theoretically, it’s the marriage of beloved things: books, friends, and snacks. I wanted to learn why the platonic ideal of this event has been so hard to achieve. So I went looking for positive templates. Proof of concept. Naturally, this lead me to the Book Club movies.
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My first, snobby impulse is to lie and tell you I was on a long flight, abetted by mimosas. While I do leave this experiment convinced that a mile high would be the best way to experience the Book Club franchise, I want you to know that I went into this with reporter’s integrity, looking for answers, notebook in hand.
The opening credit sequence informed me that Book Club, a buddy comedy starring the icons Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen, Diane Keaton, and Jane Fonda, follows a group that’s been meeting regularly since 1973. (Their first pick is Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.) Impressive, I wrote in my notebook. Then, longevity!!! I prepared to take down a second-wave reading list, delivered in rapid montage. But no cigar.
After the inaugural choice, only one other book is named in Book Club. And that book is a best-selling erotic thriller, now itself a film franchise. That second title appears 45 years after our heroes presumably get over their fear of flying, and (one infers) shake off certain feminist provocations. The actual book talk in Book Club is, accordingly, pretty slim.
Though nominally inspired by the saucy set-ups in Fifty Shades of Grey, the romantic adventures that befall our quartet over this delightful hour and a half are individually processed. The club is merely as a place to hash out personal drama. Functionally, the books here are what brunch is to the core four in Sex and the City: but a pretext for communion. As the minutes piled up and the pages stopped turning, I had to set my pencil down.
But as Richard Lawson noted in Vanity Fair, Book Club does reward the viewer in search of “all the affirming sentimental stuff.” There is wine. (So much wine!) There is wealth porn. (“I love who you are,” Don Johnson’s character says to Jane Fonda’s, in an apex love declaration. “Rich [long pause], and independent…”) At every turn, the soothing stations of genre guide the viewer like a warm palm. A dark night of the soul occurs like clockwork at the hour and fifteen mark, lobbing us gently toward the whimsical denouement. And here at the end, there is a return to pretext.
“Not everything in this world is about sex,” says Mary Steenburgen’s character, as she chides her horny friends. “Did you even read the book? This is a love story.” I prepare for a ferocious debate. Surely here, I think, over this wild claim, there will be a meeting of the minds. But again, no cigar. Instead of literary tete-a-tete, we get hijinks. Reconciliation. And promises of enduring love.
As Lawson said of the club’s second pick, “You’ll have to forgive the ladies for being a little late to the game.” And you know what? I do. I pick up my pencil again and write, secret sauce=chemistry? And wonder again if the group I’m looking for is really a way of life.
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Less need be said about the literary angle of Book Club 2: The Next Chapter, a sequel that hit screens in 2023. But speaking of pretext, the filmmaker Bill Holderman was pretty plain about the genesis of that project. As he told the Academy,
What happened was Erin [Simms, screenwriter], Jane, Candice and Mary were on a private jet going to CinemaCon in 2018 before the [first] movie came out. And on that short jaunt to Las Vegas, they decided, “There needs to be a sequel and it needs to be in Italy.” I was on a Southwest flight in the middle seat. I was like, “What? Huh?”
So it would seem the gang’s really kicked a fear of flying. But I can’t blame a cash grab. As with the previous installation, I know what I’m getting into.
The Next Chapter kicks off with Tom Petty and an epigraph from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. We find our heroes in the throes of the pandemic, meeting on Zoom.
This second iteration of a book club is, in fact, realistic. The liminal world of peak pandy is perfectly captured in an opening sequence, where the gang ponders bestsellers by white women (Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window) in attempt to self-distract from anxiety and boredom.
They even discuss the books in this one—or at least acknowledge the urge to. (“Should we talk about Normal People?” Diane asks. “Something we have very little experience with,” Candice parries back.) Bergen is the perpetual scene stealer, as well as the closest reader. In this same opening sequence, she adopts a parrot, which may or may not be a nod to a plot point in Sigrid Nunez’s novel of pandemic isolation, The Vulnerables.
But as soon as the “travel ban is lifted,” the club decides they’re tired of couches. They dispense with the hardbacks, and follow a long-deferred plan to take their coven to Italy. Though Coelho’s story of sojourn ostensibly frames this lark, the pitfalls that beset our quartet on their Roman holiday better resemble the trials of spirit in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
That’s to say, there’s no external conflict, as such. But there is inner wrestling. The gang contemplates asceticism, after a couple of grifters relieve our easy targets of their luggage. Ultimately, club members are nudged toward growth. Some leap into commitment (Fonda, Keaton), while others relinquish control (Steenburgen, Bergen).
In Italy as in California, this book club is not exactly transcended by the cultural objects they encounter—that is, if you don’t count couture. They leer at the great statues. There is mention of transformative sensory experiences (meals, boat sex) that we never quite see. There is not a book to be seen, anywhere. But there is communion.
In one read, the sequel depicts the natural telos of a club that’s served its purpose. The trip marks the end of a need for pretext. These friends have found a way to be together without rules of engagement. And no scripts.
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So, what does the book club franchise have to say about book clubs, in the end? Perhaps not much. In the first film, the 50 Shades series does unlock self-exploration. But this group suggests that a good book can do this as easily as a good friend. In general, these movies model books as portals. Excuses to talk about, through, and over difficult things. The club model on offer seems harder to emulate. Wealth and free time seem intrinsic to its success. But maybe that’s an excuse on my part.
Are excuses the key to a lasting coven? I wonder, to my notebook.
Eh. Maybe they’re a way of life.
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