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

Background

Authorial Context: Ellery Lloyd (Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos)

Ellery Lloyd is the pen name of the married writing team Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. The Club is their second book together, following People Like Her (2021), a thriller set in the world of social media influencers. The titular club is an exaggerated version of Soho House, an exclusive private club for people working in creative industries. For several years, Lyons served as its editorial director and even contributed to the launch of one of its locations: Soho Farmhouse in the Cotswolds. The novel’s setting, the fictional Boucher Island, is not one of Soho House’s locations, but it also borrows from real life: Osea Island is a privately owned island in the United Kingdom where the couple once stayed so that Lyons could review the resort.

The Club owes an even larger debt to Lyons’s experiences as a journalist for women’s magazines. In her own words:

Before that job [Soho House], I had spent a decade working in fashion magazines, and just like Home’s membership director Annie (who has a similar professional background) I had more than a few enlightening celebrity experiences, lots of them wonderful, some of them very far from it. […] I came to understand that there is a unique set of pressures that public scrutiny exerts on a person over time, how intense the need to not be seen—to go somewhere you wouldn’t be judged for not being the fictional version of yourself a fan had [in] their head—must be, especially in the age of the camera phone (Lyons, Colette. “The Jekyll and Hyde Aspect of Fame.” Reese’s Book Club, 28 Feb. 2022).

This real-world experience informs the novel, contributing to its theme of Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability. The book delivers multiple examples of stars behaving badly but also expresses sympathy for the omnipresent scrutiny that plagues them.

Philosophical Context: The Male Gaze and Objectification

When outlining his artistic theory in the novel, the character Keith Little cites one of the most covered theoretical topics of the late 20th century: “the gaze.” He embraces the patriarchal aspects of the gaze that much theory on the topic deconstructs and aims to thwart. Feminist art history and film criticism have examined the different roles that men and women often play in visual art, pointing to an active male archetype that looks at and desires a passive woman. Theorists have also interrogated the role that viewers of visual art are invited to play; that is, some visual art genders the viewer’s position as masculine (Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18).

Keith’s art goes further into the full, deliberate objectification of women. His artistic practice enacts his twisted version of gaze theory. His models are not willing. They are women whom he has drugged into unconsciousness and stripped naked. His art shows the naked female body but removes the head “so they’re not looking back at you—there’s a purity there, you know? In the looking. Power in anonymity” (Mulvey 69). This also examines the potential reciprocity of the gaze. The looked-at person has the potential to return the gaze, an ability that can create a sense of vulnerability in the viewer—the knowledge that they might become an object in turn. This point speaks to the mixed undercurrents of power and vulnerability in the novel.