Rant: Our book club spent three meetings arguing about a single character's motivation

We read 'The Dutch House' last fall, and this one member, Karen, was totally stuck on why the main character, Danny, kept going back to the house. She said it made no sense and was bad writing. The rest of us tried to explain it as grief and obsession, but she wouldn't budge. It turned into this huge thing where we kept rehashing the same points every week. We wasted almost a full month, from October into November, just circling this one issue. I finally printed out a bunch of interviews with the author, Ann Patchett, where she talks about the pull of memory, and brought them to the fourth meeting. That finally got Karen to see it differently, but man, those three sessions felt like forever. Has your group ever gotten that stuck on a tiny detail?

2 comments

2 Comments

paige_harris6d ago

Sounds exhausting. It's just a book club, not a court case.

james_ross6d ago

Ugh, that sounds brutal. But honestly, I get why Karen got stuck. Sometimes a character's choice just hits a weird personal wall for a reader. Like, if you've never felt that kind of pull to a place, it can seem dumb. I had a friend who couldn't get why anyone in a war movie would go back for a photo. He just didn't value things the same way. Maybe Karen's never been haunted by a place. The book can explain it all day, but if the feeling is foreign to you, it just looks like a plot hole.