Four or five years ago, if you asked someone about her book group, your ears were likely to be singed with anecdotes about the overconsumption of Pinot Grigio or various club members’ floundering marriages. Half the group didn’t even finish reading Donna Tartt’s book, your interlocutor would grouse; the other half kept referring to it as “The Goldfish.”
But ask today, and you might get a different response. A response betokening focused individuals and the intelligent chatter they make in the presence of their own kind. A response betokening a literal interpretation of the E. M. Forster dictum “Only connect.”
“I like the routine of revisiting the homogeneity of homosexuality — the shared references, the social graces, the minor outrages,” said Ned Martel, the former style editor of the Washington Post turned writer and producer for “Glee” and “ American Horror Story,” who, a year ago, joined an all-male, gay-themed book club in Los Angeles peopled largely with interior designers and tastemakers. “Gays are so assimilated now, and gay bars have lost their, I guess, centrality.”
“It’s a book club of political junkies.”
Janette Sadik-Khan, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation who is now a principal at Bloomberg Associates, is in an urban policy-themed book club which is full of political operatives and former members of Democratic administrations. It has been graced by visits from speakers such as Jimmy Carter and the historian Robert Caro.
Nuratu Otulana at a Literaryswag meeting in March.CreditDP Jolly
“It’s a book club of political junkies,” Sadik-Khan said. “Political junkies like to be around other political junkies and talk.”
The mystery writer Harlan Coben loves how “old school” it feels when he joins up with fellow writers Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Amor Towles, Dana Perino, John Stossel, Cristina Alger, Joseph Kanon and Douglas Brunt for their non-themed book club, which has read books like Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach,” Imbolo Mbue’s “Behold the Dreamers,” and collections of female-authored crime novels from the 1940s and 1950s.
“I feel like we should be wearing tuxes when we meet,” Coben said. “It’s one of the easiest time-machine portals that I know.”
“My metric of success is not, ‘What did everyone think of the prose?’ ”
The presence of insiders at a book club heralds both pleasures and challenges. On the pleasure front: O, the schmingling. Yahdon Israel, the former editor of Brooklyn magazine who now teaches at City College and the New School, said of his club Literaryswag, which is open to the public and held in the vintage clothing store The Brooklyn Circus, “My metric of success is not, ‘What did everyone think of the prose?’ ” Rather, he hopes club members will make friends with one another, or talk about the book later.
To up the ante, Israel selects books you don’t have to have read in order to join the conversation because the subject matter is so rich (a recent pick: Margo Jefferson’s book “On Michael Jackson”), and he anoints at each session the Swaggiest Member (best-dressed) and the Littest Person (most thoughtful).
Some folks in book clubs enjoy the inside dope that an insider can bring. Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, said of his group, “People will ask for a little scuttlebutt from behind the scenes of publishing as to how this particular book came into the world, or what I know about the author.”
Or imagine the clarity and depth that Proust scholar Marcelle Clements must bring to sessions of the Proust-themed club founded by the novelist Michael Cunningham, McNally Jackson bookstores owner Sarah McNally, and punk musician Billy Hough. Long, snakey sentences: parsed. The Vivonne river: more vivonné than ever.
At a recent session of Book the Writer — the novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book club in which subscribers are given the opportunity to pay $35 to chat with an author — fans of the playwright Sarah Ruhl and her book “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write” thrilled to two of Ruhl’s confessions. (She is writing a musical version of the film “A Face in the Crowd,” with music by Elvis Costello, and sometimes ducks into the WeWork co-working space across from her children’s’ school in Brooklyn whence she can see them on the playground.)
On the challenges side of the equation, the increased level of sophistication that the influential bestow on a group can augur a decreased level of indulgence. One member of a children’s literature group said, “We would kick you out if you wanted to talk about ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ There’s no place for you here. We’ve had people who just have not lasted.”
Simonoff, the literary agent, added that though he tends to recuse himself from the selecting of books for his group, the group once included a member “who objected to one of my clients’ books being read by us. She is no longer in the group.”
Indeed, the selection of books can be a more freighted process when publishing professionals are present. Louise Grunwald, the widow of the former diplomat and Time Inc. editor in chief Henry Grunwald, says the reading picks of her group’s leader, the novelist John Burnham Schwartz, sometimes prevail over other members’ suggestions. “It seems like a democratic process, but it really isn’t,” Grunwald said. “In the end, I find, it’s by fiat. But disguised as democratic.”
“You ask yourself, Should I fake it, or should I just admit I didn’t finish the book?”
Conversely, Coben finds that the novelists in his group are egalitarian: “Sure, there are elder statesmen and younger bucks. But no one dominates the conversation.” However, the presence of literary luminaries in the room can make a member’s unpreparedness especially piquant. “You ask yourself, Should I fake it, or should I just admit I didn’t finish the book? All members have done that at one point.”
Does Grunwald feel that being among the last left of New York’s acknowledged great hostesses puts a burden on her or on other members when it’s their turn to host? “I see what you mean,” she said. “But no. Everyone does his own thing. And sometimes people even have fun with it. If we’re reading an Egyptian novel, we’ll have hummus.”
What about Martel and his interior designers: Are kale leaves being massaged and couches Scotch-Guarded as we speak? “Yes, but convention steers toward studied casualness,” Martel said. Nevertheless, he added, “Sometimes the table is set for a night of taste and restraint, and then the rosé happens.”
For some hosts, the pressure to make the rosé happen is more plangent. The public policy-themed club attended by Sadik-Khan is always hosted by the group’s co-founder Gary Ginsberg, the senior vice president and head of communications at SoftBank. The group, about 15 in size, occasionally invites authors it is reading. Given that the first three books the club read were by Caro, Ginsberg was understandably nerve-racked when the author agreed to speak at one of the club’s meetings.
“It was terrifying,” Ginsberg said. “He’s the one historian we all hold in awe. You want to get it right. You want to make sure the quality of the conversation is up to his level of writing and investigation.” Caro stayed for three hours and was, Ginsberg said, “mesmerizing.” Carter, who came to discuss Lawrence Wright’s “13 Days in September,” did not stay as long, but wowed the group with his “incredible, almost minute-to-minute recall” of the 1978 meeting with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.
Every age begets its era-specific book club. At the origins of the pastime — mid-18th-century England — women, shut out from most colleges and learned gatherings, opened their living rooms to male luminaries in an effort at intellectual autonomy. In the 1950s, the Great Books movement helped an economically robust postwar society flex its cultural and democratic muscles.
Inevitably, today’s book clubs mirror the everything-is-political ethos of our time: here is Martel and company discussing the AIDS-era memoir “Fairyland,” there is Ruhl discussing whether the well-made play is essentially a patriarchal structure. In an age in which public discourse has been sullied, and political lines have been drawn in the sand, it makes sense that people would want to bond with the like-minded.
“You know these meetings are a tryout.”
Cassandra Lam is the chief executive of The Cosmos, a community of self-identifying Asian-American women. A proud daughter of Vietnamese boat refugee parents, Lam said that many of the women in their 20s and 30s who are drawn to the group’s book club meetings grew up without seeing people who look like them in books or on TV.
Consequently, at the meetings, devoted to Asian-American diasporic literature written by women, “Some people don’t have much to say because it’s so emotional just to be there. It’s like how so many Asian people cried during ‘Crazy Rich Asians’: that’s not a sad movie, it’s simply that these people had never seen themselves before. In that moment you realize the boundaries of what’s possible have expanded.”
For Israel of Literaryswag, these expanded horizons imply responsibility: “You know these meetings are a tryout. The people at them are gonna be your collaborators, your co-conspirators, the people you start businesses and families with.”
