After:
Naomi Kanakia, "The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions," Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2, 2022.
The book club exists because we'd like to think the book will "improve our minds in some way" and "contribute measurably to our intellectual lives."
Yet even those of us who are talented critics struggle to say more than whether we liked the book. Adults consider our own enjoyment as an "explicit factor" in choosing to read.
Book clubs "interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced," i.e., for pleasure, and thus "obviously draw their inspiration from that great temple of forced reading: high school." A book club has the broad form of a class discussion — "the schedule, the discussion, the forced reading."
Nonfiction is easier to discuss
It's easy to talk about books that are "fundamentally about ideas: What does the future hold? What motivates a person to kill for a cause? These are big, open questions that you can readily discuss. We all think about ideology. We all think about current events. We can engage easily with these texts and do it on a more even footing, arguing with their conclusions and adding our own experiences to provide a counterpoint."
Fiction is hard "unless you resort to deconstruction, power analysis, or high school–style New Criticism, there's simply not much to say beyond 'This is why you should/shouldn't read this book' - a topic for which, honestly, a few hundred words would usually suffice. Nonfiction, in contrast, offers a jumping-off point for talking about the broader implications of ideas and for arguing with the author's conclusions." You can't do this with fiction because "good fiction doesn't contain a clear viewpoint on the material," and insofar as it makes points, it "already contains whatever broader points you would want to make" but stated much better than you could possibly state them (which is why you read the book), and "moreover, fiction doesn't generalize: it's about specific people doing specific things," so for you to say that many people do not or should not do these things is N/A.
Yet book clubs choose fiction
They do so because fiction is enjoyable, or because of "a hangover from English class," or specifically because of "the complexity of the novel — for the way it eludes easy answers," which makes it seem as though there's something to be discussed, something to be gotten.
Choose moral analysis
So if you're going to read fiction for a book club, Kanakia suggests, you can do "moral analysis," which "is a bit simpler [than power analysis]: it takes the work as given, almost as if the story were nonfiction. In a moral analysis, you talk about the characters as freely and simply as if they were real people you know," which "we're usually unafraid to exercise when it comes to television shows or the lives of our friends." For context: Tolstoy's What Is Art? (1897) in which he argues that art is about moral edification, not pleasure. (This approach allows us to stay friends with each other, believe that reading the book was worthwhile, and avoid summarizing the whole book.) See also John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978).
Asking moral questions "might be uncomfortable, but if we don't want to explore that discomfort, we should probably just join a knitting circle instead."
See also: "Moral analysis of what is 'at stake in this story'". It's a 4-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.
