The Club

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Vanity Fair Excerpt 3-Chapter 4

Vanity Fair Excerpt 5-Chapter 7

Vanity Fair Excerpt 8-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Masks and Concealment

Masks as a symbol serve a dual function in the novel, helping to disguise as well as expose individuals during the launch of Island Home. The novel takes place on Halloween weekend, traditionally a time to dress in costume. On the final evening, an immersive theater group puts on a huge production, cloaking its audience and giving them each a stylized comedy or tragedy mask. This uniform disguise conceals individual identities. Annie relies on it in her plot to have Keith and Freddie kill Ned and disappear back into the anonymous crowd. Unfortunately for Adam, it equally conceals the victim’s identity, contributing to his death when Keith mistakes him for his brother. The accompanying motif of concealment highlights the theme of Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives.

For both murderer and victim, this moment of concealed identity is also a moment of revelation. Adam finally accepts responsibility for his complicity in Ned’s crimes, and Keith becomes a murderer. He literally reduces Adam to a body in the ultimate theft of agency, which is a natural extension of the crime for which Ned blackmails him, in which he renders women unconscious and photographs their naked bodies. As the leader of the theater troupe puts it, “I guess what we hadn’t reckoned with was that when you give people a mask, that’s when they show you what they really are” (193). It’s similar to the principle behind Home: “[A]ll you need to do is present them with something you know they can’t resist, somewhere they think they can get away with it” (290). Identities are both concealed and revealed through the literal and metaphorical masks that Home provides.

Jokes and Games

Ned Groom toys with and mocks the people around him, delighting in the control. He says cruel things in a deliberately ambiguous tone: “Everything was a joke until it was serious. Everything was serious until it was a joke” (23). This palindrome of “joke […] serious […] serious […] joke” creates a pattern that mimics play in a game. Only Ned’s reality matters, and he lives his life “like some weird game that no one else [is] playing” (252). He enjoys the entire blackmail scheme and having powerful men at his mercy, regardless of how he harms others in the process. Nikki discovers the full extent of his involvement in her victimization and ruminates: “It’s not every day that you discover your whole adult life has been built around an elaborate practical joke” (155). She presents Ned’s perspective on her life at this point, seeing a grooming scheme as a “joke.”

Ned victimizes others close to him as well. Annie has stored up grievances over joking slights, and Adam is so frequently the butt of Ned’s humor that he feels “he [has] gone from being a person to being a running joke” (96). His view of himself not as a “person” but a “joke” highlights the fact that he takes on characteristics given to him by Ned rather than constructing his own narrative. Adam feels incapable of even choosing a sunshade color for a Home location without Ned’s guidance.

Still, Ned isn’t the only joker or game player. His callousness is a heightened version of the public’s gleeful appropriation of celebrity stories for their own amusement. People on the internet treat the Island Home fiasco as a source of entertainment. Freddie goes on social media and finds that a rumor of his death led people to make “Freddie Hunter jokes” and paste his “face into the poster for Finding Nemo” (138). He accuses others of being “keyboard detectives […] treating it like it’s a game of bloody Clue” (139). His pain highlights the theme of Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability.

The Headless Collage

Island Home displays one of Keith’s collages in the main building: “a giant black-and-white photograph of a headless nude” woman (147). He interprets his work for a female character as “a rumination on the gaze” (69). As a symbol of celebrity, the collage invites the viewer into a relationship that reflects stars’ vulnerability to the public. It’s a headless body, stripped of its identity and turned into a composite “collage.” Anonymous viewers have the power to look at and interpret the vulnerable object. The body’s garments—tarantulas for nipple covers and a web decorating the crotch—add to the sense that the giant body is as much the spiders’ prey as are the “multicolored gemstone insects trapped in [the web’s] threads” (147).