There’s still only one Jane Austen

“What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her? What is it all about?”

Unlike Joseph Conrad, who posed these frenzied questions to his fellow novelist H.G. Wells in 1901, most readers do see the point of Jane Austen. Her admirers include exigent literary critics, ordinary readers and everyone in between. It’s no wonder her novels have been made into movies (with varying success) or inspired less gifted novelists to attempt sequels. But the trouble with getting too close to Austen -- or any great artist -- is that unless you are exceptionally good, you’re likely to suffer by comparison.

Novelist and short story writer Karen Joy Fowler (author of “Sister Noon,” “Sarah Canary,” “The Sweetheart Season” and “Black Glass”) is clearly an Austen fan. Her latest novel, “The Jane Austen Book Club,” banks on the enduring appeal of the perennially fresh Jane -- along with the popularity of book clubs -- as a surefire way to captivate an audience. It tells the story of a reading group of five women and one man who meet in one another’s homes in California’s Central Valley to discuss Austen’s novels.

Jocelyn, the group’s benignantly bossy leader, comes from a privileged background, is successful in her career but has never married. Her longtime best friend, Sylvia, a more self-effacing, reflective soul, is reeling from the recent shock of the infidelity of her formerly dependable and devoted husband.

Allegra, Sylvia’s grown daughter, is a vampish lesbian whose real passion is for passion itself. Adrenaline, “her drug of choice,” involves her in perilous sports at which she seems particularly accident-prone, life-threatening injury being another way of getting those adrenal glands going. Allegra proves a tiresome character (a textbook illustration of the spoiled adult-child), although not as tiresome as the narrative voice constantly informing us how beautiful she’s supposed to be.

This voice is the novel’s first obvious weakness. Fowler has opted for the collective “we,” a device that worked well for Jeffrey Eugenides in “The Virgin Suicides,” in which the boys in question were undifferentiated observers of the girls’ self-contained tragedy, rather like a Greek chorus. But Fowler’s “we” is the Jane Austen Book Club, each member of which is also a key player in the story and each of whom is described by the narrative “we” from an outside perspective. Given that all six members of the club are objects critically described by a narrative voice, the reader can only wonder who is doing all the describing.

At 67 the group’s oldest member, Bernadette is “letting herself go,” not bothering about her appearance. The others consider her long-winded, although frankly she doesn’t seem any more so than anyone else in the group. Prudie, one of the younger members, is a (reasonably) happily married schoolteacher who prides herself on her knowledge of French. She seems a tad unstable, though in a quieter way than Allegra: tense, uptight.

Grigg, the group’s only male, proves a welcome addition -- and he’s available too. He likes “Northanger Abbey” and is the only club member familiar with the Gothic novels that Austen was spoofing. Unfortunately for the reader, Grigg got to be such a fine fellow thanks to the influence of his three older sisters, glowingly well-adjusted, self-satisfied superwomen whose annoyingly savvy e-mails to one another take up the better part of a chapter.

The group’s discussions of Austen form part of the story, but most of it is about the members themselves: their histories, their current problems and prospects. Although one might accuse Fowler of using Austen merely as a kind of hook, there is nothing wrong (in principle) with her wish to go beyond a comic exercise in amateur literary criticism to write her own novel about six contemporary characters in the Central Valley. The trouble is, these characters are not vividly drawn and, unlike Austen’s characters, they are not convincingly developed. Their story lines fly off in different directions (each paved with cliches), undermining the novel’s coherence. All that we (the readers, not the “we” of the book group) feel by the end is that we’ve been dragged through a thin and flaccid piece of literary gamesmanship: a watery imitation of Austen’s social comedy.

In truth, the best part of Fowler’s book is the selection of quotes she provides at the end: responses to Austen from readers, starting with members of Austen’s family circle and continuing with Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Chief Justice John Marshall, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, Rebecca West, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Angus Wilson, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Gish Jen and Andy Rooney, who never bothered to read Austen.

Among the most charming comes from G.K. Chesterton: “Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontes or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.”