The Fab 5 Book Club has not stopped reading either. Tonight
we tackled The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. Before we get started, you need to
understand that the Fab 5, while being a very chatty crowd, does not always
stay on topic very well. Also you need to understand that we don’t all always
come terribly prepared. Tonight was a different story. Everyone had finished the book, even the one who started it last night at 5 and finished it around midnight (Hint: This was not me, at least not this time). It’s a fairly quick read, which is always helpful in last-minute cramming. And Nancy was very eager to get started, trying to come up with some less-than-obvious segues from the food we were noshing to the plot of the book, things like “I bet they wished they had cheese like this on the lifeboat.”
And finally we gave in and actually talked about the book. The Lifeboat is a story about just what it sounds like, a lifeboat. The Empress Alexandra, a fictional ocean liner crossing the Atlantic just 2 years after the Titanic disaster, sinks in open water, and passengers scramble to get onto lifeboats. Grace, a new bride, is pushed onto a lifeboat by her husband, and the story begins. Thirty-nine people set off in a lifeboat, only to be lost at sea for 21 grueling days.
At the start of the book, Grace has survived the lifeboat
and now finds herself facing a new obstacle: she is standing trial. She writes
a diary of her experiences for her lawyers.
Grace is an enigmatic character, presenting readers with
lots of ethical and moral questions. But while this might seem to be a book
based on the old ethics question of the lifeboat—a lifeboat has too many
people, so you must find a rational way to decide who should go overboard—it really
turns out to be something different. As Grace goes through the process of
recollection, trying to bring to the surface moments that she cannot easily remember,
readers find no easy understanding of her fellow passengers’ actions. Nor can
we get a handle on Grace herself. So rather than asking what we would do in their
situation, we spent a lot of time trying to understand who did what and why.
Interestingly, three of the four of us read this book with
one or two other stories in the back of our minds, influencing what we read.
Sonya had the movie Titanic in her head, which made her suspicious of Grace’s
husband’s actions before the boat sank. Nancy couldn’t help but think of our
recent read Gone Girl, in which a woman’s diary takes on a different significance
as the book goes on. I had shadows of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, in which
the main character has been accused of murder but you really have no idea if
she is guilty or not, or what guilt even means. Also Life of Pi loomed large in
the lifeboat imagination.
This may be the longest period of time we’ve ever spent
talking about a book at book club, which is all the more surprising since each
of us expressed some degree of disappointment with the book. There are many,
many threads and clues—or red herrings, as the case may be—that lead us
nowhere, and none of us were terribly satisfied with that. Grace says straight
out that we can’t know everything, but that did nothing to quell our
dissatisfaction. We spent a bit of time talking about whether a book (or other
form of entertainment) should tie up most or all loose ends, or if that is also
unsatisfying. It seems there is some middle ground, Chekhov’s gun
notwithstanding.
It may be that my own dissatisfaction with the ending had less
to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that I was reading it
electronically, and the end came even though there were still 30 more digital
pages to go—acknowledgements, suggested reading, endorsements, reading group
guide, etc. etc. And here I thought there was still more to the story.
Of course we did get a bit off topic, debating which people
we might be okay with pushing overboard and discussing the fact that all of us
would probably die within the first few days because we are, well, soft. Barbara
mentioned the day that she had a paper cut on the tip of her finger, and her
day was an anguish of alternating between typing with a band-aid on, which made
for many typing errors, and typing without a band-aid, which “really hurt.” I
scoffed at the idea of needing a trailer to go camping, then remembered that
the threat of a rainstorm sends me from my tent to the nearest hotel. Don’t think
any of us would do too well in boot camp, let alone any real human
deprivation.
But no deprivation was happening here, as we passed around
the dark chocolate sea salt caramels. Final judgment: The Lifeboat had some saving graces, but you don't really want to stay in it forever.
