The Club

“Because really, isn’t that what power is? A middle-aged Rumpelstiltskin, jumping up and down, visibly out of breath, swinging on a chandelier, and no one daring to laugh. A grown man so cross with an oil painting of an old lady he looks as if he is about to burst the buttons off his shirt, and nobody daring to suggest he might be overreacting just a little.”

Nikki observes one of Ned’s tantrums. Lloyd invokes the fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin to highlight the absurdity of the scene. The motif of jokes runs throughout the laughter, or lack of it, as part of Ned’s power lies in determining who or what is dismissible as a joke and what needs to be taken seriously. The allusion to Rumpelstiltskin also reminds the reader of Ned’s wealth and the means by which he collects it: He turns undesirable things—the sins of Home’s members—into gold through blackmail.

“It was always weird […] to observe how many of [Jackson’s] own mannerisms found their way on-screen. Or was it perhaps the other way around? That smile, that trademark knowing smirk, for instance—had he always done that in real life, at dinner, or had some director once suggested it to him for a long-ago role?”

During Thursday night’s dinner, Nikki ponders the relationship between Jackson and the characters he plays. Jackson troubles the distinction between “real life” and “on-screen.” As a child, Jess identifies the man as Captain Aquatic, but she is not the only person to struggle to differentiate between the man and his “roles.” Hollywood has created Jackson who often comes across as overly rehearsed to people who meet him. There is no tracing an authentic self, only “trademark” elements of which the authorship is uncertain.

“To the public, the general public, it looks as if being famous is like being in one big room, the Oscars or the Grammys or something, a room full of familiar, beloved faces all huddling together for selfies, all smiling, all the best of friends. Whereas, in fact, Annie’s editor had explained, leaning in slightly closer, what fame more closely resembles is a series of roped-off rooms, each more exclusive than the last, the whole thing as hierarchical as high school.”

Annie remembers a model of celebrity proposed by a former boss and based on the layout of a nightclub. The novel’s title, The Club, refers both to the actual club at which the novel takes place and this model of celebrity. The precarity of The Idea of Home in the novel results from the lack of real privacy or community. While, from the outside, people mistake the stars for a homogenous group of friends, the image has all the depth of two-dimensional “selfies.” Instead of resembling “one big room,” fame is hierarchical. Home Group functions the same way, though many of its barriers are subtle. Its exclusivity and the lack of open communication between its members means that people strive to ascend the ranks, never realizing that the highest echelon belongs to the blackmailed members over whom Ned’s power is greatest.

“She did wonder what it might feel like to be the owner of a face like that, global public property, to wander about on holiday and suddenly spot your own visage staring back at you from—say—the side of a bus in Istanbul, or a billboard in Dubai, or painted wonkily on the side of some fairground ride in Prague. Your actual face.”

Jess thinks about how strange Jackson Crane’s life must be. The passage presents one of the strongest statements about Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability. While Jackson’s reach is great, there is also a sense that he and his face are “global public property.” The extent of his fame alienates him from his face, which he regularly encounters as something separate from himself.

“Back in the nineteenth century, celebrity was simply used to describe someone recognized in their field. Charles Darwin was a celebrity; Florence Nightingale was a celebrity […] It was only quite late in the twentieth century that the word had begun to take on negative connotations, to carry a suggestion of superficiality, to be associated increasingly with undeserved fame, someone to whom society paid unwarranted attention. All of which happened at exactly the same time as the word began increasingly to be used to describe young women in the public eye.”

Annie watches the guests mingle on the yacht during Friday’s opening to the weekend and ponders the meaning of “celebrity.” The evolution of the word reflects the vulnerability of stars to continual (re)interpretation and the “public eye.” Annie sees it as an ambivalent marker that suggests “unwarranted attention” as much as excellence in a given area. It’s also a word that can be deployed to undermine women. Annie is the most invested in the world of celebrity but also a critic of its prevalent sexism.

“In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy […] it came to seem that anybody could do it. Especially if you were also as gregarious as Annie was, if your laugh was a boisterous shriek (it was helpful if whenever anyone needed her, they could hear her across a room—and someone always needed her, for something) and if you dressed for maximum impact (so you were similarly easy to spot—although in some ways the elaborate almost-costumes were also a cloak of invisibility, allowing the woman she really was to disappear under sequins and silly shoes).”

When she overhears Ned decide to fire her, Annie reflects on how easy it is to dismiss her and discount her skill and hard work. She is presented as very good at all aspects of her job (including the less savory ones). The nature of the work contributes to her vulnerability too. The text suggests that women administrators—figures often put in the position of making things run smoothly behind the scenes—are particularly easy to dismiss. Only when things go wrong is their effort visible.

“Tell her what you’re like, of course, Adam. What you’re really like. It’s funny, isn’t it, the way we go through life, curating the version of ourselves we show to the world, editing it oh so carefully, that version of ourselves we share with our friends, with our family. Maybe even with ourselves. Maybe most of all with ourselves, actually.”

Ned threatens to show Adam’s wife the evidence of Adam’s affairs. His interpretation of Adam’s carefully edited personas extends ideas elsewhere treated as part of the theme Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability, applying them to ordinary people. He points out that Adam has a deliberately curated brand: a version that he prefers others (and even himself) to see.

“But at least back then it took a bit of effort to find out what people were saying about you. The cruel comments. The jokes. These days? It’s always there, in your pocket. If there’s something bad you think about yourself, within ten seconds you can find someone who has already said it online but ten times worse.”

In his interview with Vanity Fair, Freddie rues the effect of the internet age on the life of a celebrity. He suggests that the anonymity of internet press licenses people to publish outrageous, vicious statements; the creation of an all-encompassing press corps of ordinary people posting material at all hours of the day makes it hard for celebrities to relax. Lloyd uses the motif of “jokes” to draw attention to the fact that Freddie does not have control over whether and how people laugh at him.

“What more obvious proof did you want of how horrible life in the public eye must be, how happy they were to avoid that harsh glare, than the very existence of somewhere like Home? […] The phone taps. The cloud hacks. The guy who’d got over the wall of her Brooklyn brownstone and into her backyard with a backpack full of duct tape and cable ties.”

Nikki encounters a previous modeling peer and current celebrity. Lily treats her with disdain, but Nikki feels only pity. Nikki’s perception of fame’s difficulties echoes author Collette Lyons’s own words (See: Background). Celebrities in the novel contend with any number of invasions of their privacy; their digital worlds and physical homes are both vulnerable to the public’s rabid interest. Lloyd hints through the “duct tape and cable ties” that Lily was fortunate to escape an attempted kidnapping, leaving it unsaid to create a heightened sense of uncertainty and danger.

“No, her own family was the sort where nobody cared if you ran away and sofa surfed with people you barely knew […] In comparison, Home felt like the sort of big, complicated family you saw on TV and there had always been something comforting about that.”

Nikki reflects on the attraction of Home’s camaraderie, particularly in light of the problems with her own nuclear family. The passage sheds light on her loyalty to her employer. As reflected through the theme of The Idea of Home, the intimacy is a carefully crafted illusion. It’s “like the sort of big, complicated family you saw on TV,” appealing but fictional.

“You’d think that the members themselves would be the weak link in the operation [but] there was nothing they could say without incriminating themselves. I too have a nasty habit, a dirty secret, an unpleasant little career killer I need to hide at all costs, so I know that Home is not the place to do things you wouldn’t at home.”

Annie approaches two of the blackmail victims and thinks of the role that they play in perpetuating Ned’s system of blackmailing members. The very things that should bring them together divide them, and none are ever willing to risk their own exposure to spare others. Members look to “Home” as a more protected “home,” but division of the two highlights the irony that Home is in fact not homely.

“It was Ned’s idea really, he loved the idea of taking people who spend their lives being recognized and rendering them invisible for the night […] 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.”

The director of the theater troupe hired to put on the immersive production explains the rationale behind outfitting the full audience with cloaks and masks. Lloyd uses the symbol of masks as the director suggests that concealment and anonymity enable people to express hidden facets of their personalities. This reflects what Ned does with Home Group: creates a space in which over-visible people can be invisible.

“No, he tells them he wants to photograph them and that’s exactly what he does. Once they’re in his suite, comatose, he undresses them. Poses them, like a doll. Then he gets his camera out and click. Then he moves one arm a little, one leg a bit, stands back to survey his handiwork. Click. Leans in a little closer. Click. Then a lot closer. Click. Never touches them in that way. Never touches himself either—.”

Ned tells Annie what the videos on Keith’s memory stick show. She expected evidence of sexual escapades, but the artist strips women of both their voices and their agency, a more literal representation of the kind of systemic abuse that Ron enacts. This passage suggests how violating certain gazes can be since Keith wields physical power in both his arrangement of the women “like a doll” and his preservation of this image via his camera. This creates an eerie and abusive sense of artistry.

“What does it do to someone, to be repeatedly told that what you know to be true is a lie? How does it change the way you relate to the world, to other people? How you process your grief, how you carry your anger? All that pain, all that rage—she could literally feel it, like a weight pressing down on her heart, her lungs.”

Jess was ignored, silenced, or mocked by family, friends, and the authorities for her account of her father’s death. Her character arc most intimately explores the theme of Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives. Her rhetorical questions in this passage evoke pathos as they prompt the reader to put themselves in the shoes of clinging to what she knows to be true and reconsidering aspects of her memory.

“And maybe she might have been able to forgive them, to start to move on, if they were just normal people she could pretend did not exist, if one or other or both of them were not always there, every time you sat at a bus stop or went to the cinema or opened a magazine or logged on to the internet.”

Jess notes the impossibility of moving on when the Cranes’ images were omnipresent in her life. The novel often explores the vulnerability of celebrities to the intrusion of others. Here, the roles are flipped. Without trying, the Cranes invade her world in a heightened version of the public’s susceptibility to the icons they promote.

“These were things she had accepted as truths, things that had gone to make up part of her sense of self, a sort of gift from him, she had thought.”

Nikki remembers the compliments that Ron gave her when she was a girl. The passage suggests the need to revise personal histories as one grows and learns. The language reflects that used by Jess earlier—“what you know to be true is a lie” (219)—and hence touches on the porous nature of identity by suggesting that everyone is to some extent “made up” by other people, not just celebrities.

“It’s not a normal life we lead. It’s not a normal marriage. How could it be? You can’t have any idea—I didn’t have any idea—what it’s like to live the way he does. The way we do.”

Georgia married Jackson when she was young and still making her name. Lloyd addresses the theme of Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability when Georgia here counters the popular argument that celebrities should tolerate the bad aspects of fame as a price that they knowingly accepted. To her, the experience is so alien—so far from “normal life”—that there is no understanding it from the outside.

“And it was only then that it dawned on him how often, especially over the last few years, it had been Ned who kept putting temptation in his way […] and there was actually a trace of genuine pity, in the anger he felt. To live your life like Ned did, like some weird game that no one else was playing.”

In his final section, Adam dies at Keith’s hands, mistaken for Ned. He reflects on his relationship with his brother. Lloyd uses the motif of games to evoke pathos at this moment, highlighting the loneliness of playing a “game that no one else [is] playing.” Although Ned is an antagonist, he is at times portrayed as a sympathetic figure.

“‘And because I’m paranoid now, about being recorded, I always insist we meet on neutral ground, somewhere private, somewhere safe. Somewhere phones aren’t allowed.’ ‘Home,’ Annie said. ‘Yeah,’ said Freddie […] ‘Home. Oh, the irony.’”

Freddie tells Annie why he sold out his friends. Already a victim of blackmail, he insisted on meeting in Home’s supposedly camera-free rooms. He pithily sums up the instability of The Idea of Home in the novel: “Home. Oh, the irony.” Home is neither private nor safe. It is merely tightly controlled by Ned.

“Even now, when she pictured the face next to Jackson’s in the front of the vehicle he had been driving that night, it was Georgia’s face she pictured. Even now. Which meant that all these years, whenever she had thought she was recalling the night of her parents’ death, refusing to forget what she had seen, refusing to believe she had forgotten a single detail of that moment, her brain had been at work, embroidering, reordering.”

Jess finally believes that Georgia was not present on the night that Jackson killed her father in a drunken hit-and-run. All the characters tell themselves stories about their past that are informed by third-person perspectives as well as partial recollections. While Jess was clinging to an idea, her brain was “at work, embroidering, reordering.” The invocation of “embroidering” conjures images of both creating and unpicking, highlighting the theme of Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives.

“It’s the reputational aspect that’s the issue. The damage a scandal might do to the brand. And you’ve got to remember how much your brand is worth, when you’re someone like Ron Cox. When you’re a director […] a family guy—there’s a lot of money at stake. A lot of money.”

Confronted by Nikki, Ned explains why Ron wanted to adopt Kurt and forestall potential scandals down the line. Lloyd presents Ron as a “brand” in which a lot of people have invested, reducing the division between people and businesses and exploring the processes of dehumanization when it comes to celebrity culture.

“After all these years he not only thought of her solely in terms of her value to him, to Home, but also seemed to find it hard to imagine that she might object to that, or see herself differently. That was as galling as anything—the knowledge that he had played games not just with her life, and her son’s life, but with their very ideas of themselves too, their sense of who they were.”

Nikki finds herself pushed to the breaking point by Ned’s failure to show any remorse. This moment provokes her into pushing Ned into the water, killing him. Her observation that Ned cannot “imagine that she might object to that, or see herself differently” is just one example in the novel of a woman subject to the gaze of a man and reduced to an inert object.

“The classic murder mystery ends with a neat set of motives, a culprit, and a comeuppance. Perhaps that is why we read them. Perhaps that is why we love them. Because real life offers us so few of these consolations, so few of these satisfactions. Maybe one day a clue will be uncovered or a confession will come to light to offer us the sense of closure the books and the movies have taught us to expect, and to believe we deserve.”

The framing Vanity Fair article admits that there are still no official answers to the questions of how Ned drowned or why Keith killed Adam. The difficulty of putting together one integrated account partly arises from the multiplicity of plots and perspectives. The Club is a slightly chaotic narrative, told in a piecemeal way. The reader receives more answers and closure than the fictional journalist, but it also resists the tidy ending of a “class murder mystery.”