No End of Wit
Author of The Jane Austen Book Club continues her examination of writers and readers
by Faye Jones
Is fiction really on its deathbed? Lots of people think so. Surveys show that most adults don’t read even one novel a year, and pessimists argue that pleasure reading will soon be as rare as doctors who treat disease by bloodletting. In such rants of gloom and doom, it is well to remember the passion for books of those who actually do read. For them, Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet are as real as the person in the next cubicle, perhaps more so, and Karen Joy Fowler explores this ardor in her latest novel, Wit’s End (Putnam, 324 pp., $24.95).
After the death of her father, Rima Lanisell goes to stay with her godmother, the famous mystery writer Addison Early, and her quirky household, which includes two dogs, a housekeeper, her son, the two college students who take care of the dogs and various dollhouses that depict the murders in Addison’s novels.
While Addison seems to be battling writer’s block, Rima has her own problems. She hopes to learn more about her father from Addison, who named a character after him and who may have had a relationship with him. Rima is also grieving the loss of both her mother and brother Oliver, especially Oliver: “You weren’t supposed to love your brother more than anyone else in the world,” she says. “Maybe in a Dickens novel you could get away with that, but not today. Not here at the start of the twenty-first century, when the whole world of MySpace friends lay before you.”
From this quintessentially 21st century scenario, Fowler deftly introduces the age-old question of who really owns a literary character: the writer who creates him or the readers who identify with him. In one subplot, Addison and an avid reader do battle by alternately adding and deleting a certain passage from Wikipedia. At another point, Rima wakes the next morning after a scene in a bar to find that one of the college students has posted a description of the previous evening to a blog. Unsurprisingly, Rima’s actions are then debated by an online discussion group as if she were a character in the mystery series.
All of which makes for that rare thing: an entertaining literary novel. While it can be argued that this novel is actually about the intertwining of fact and fiction and how memory is a mixture of both, this is no self-important tome. The characters are sharp and witty, with many just plain funny moments. Besides, you have to love a novel that pays tribute to librarians: “Rima’s father had always told her never to underestimate librarians. The Patriot Act, he’d said, had made the mistake of underestimating librarians, and now they were the only thing standing between us and 1984, and they weren’t all spineless the way Congress was. They read books. His money was on them.”
Wit’s End may not have the built-in audience that The Jane Austen Book Club did, but it’s the kind of novel that Austen herself just might have enjoyed.
Fowler will read at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on April 2 at 7 p.m.
Comments (0)