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

Themes

Celebrity: Power and Vulnerability

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, sexual assault, and alcohol and drug abuse.

The Club investigates various aspects of the celebrity experience. Being a celebrity empowers characters in good ways as well as bad. For example, at the end of the novel, Kurt Cox takes advantage of his platform to speak on behalf of the silenced, while his father uses his celebrity status to abuse people. However, celebrity is a form of extreme vulnerability, leading stars to lose their private spaces and even their private selves.

Celebrity misbehavior drives much of The Club’s plot, but the novel contextualizes these misdeeds within the dynamic of surveillance between famous people and the public. Although she is Jackson’s least sympathetic critic—Jackson killed her father—Jess admits that his level of fame would be difficult due to the “impossibility of turning it off, all the normal everyday things…you would never be able to do again. The fact that you could not get away with anything, ever, unless you were somewhere like Home” (92). The constant surveillance robs celebrities of the freedom and privacy that their observers in the public have. Jess goes on to wonder how it would feel to have a face that’s “global public property” and “know that all around the world people [are] measuring their lives against yours, fantasizing about you” (91). Referring to celebrities as “global public property” brings the club business itself to mind, it being a conglomerate of global properties, drawing parallels between the branding and profiting of both business and celebrity. Even celebrity houses and private computers in the novel aren’t safe. At one point, Nikki regards a famous once-peer with pity. She thinks of the stalkers and hackers that invaded their home. Even the freedom provided by Home is an illusion. Ned’s blackmail footage, previously shot through a camera hidden in Jackson’s room, leads to Jackson’s star’s meltdown. The public in the novel feel entitled to speculate about public figures. The celebrities are subject to lies as well as exposure. After the car crash, Freddie Hunter speaks about suffering from the casual theories and mocking comments from an anonymous, global community online.

This level of public scrutiny in the novel leads to a suggestion that some characters perform to the point that it’s impossible to distinguish between the public persona and the private individual. In its most extreme form, celebrity status erodes characters’ sense of self. For example, several characters remark on an element of hollowness in their interactions with Jackson. Adam questions whether Jackson’s words are his own or a line from some movie. He thinks about how Jackson rarely needs to handle a difficult situation

without a team of people around them to convey ‘how Jackson feels’ or ‘what Jackson would like’ […] It was no wonder, then, that without his supporting cast of yes-men and fixers, he seemed to be slipping into the language of characters he’d played (249).

This passage suggests that Jackson’s fundamental ability to speak in the first person, to say “I,” has been compromised by his celebrity status.

Celebrity in the novel blends power and vulnerability. It also threatens to replace the individual with their image, alienating characters from themselves as well as from others.

The Idea of Home

The word “home” echoes throughout the novel. Home is the name of the titular club, and Ned trades on his members’ needs for safe places to relax away from the cameras. The irony is that an exclusive club run as an international business corporation cannot be a “home” without losing the essence of the word. Instead, Ned’s clubs pervert the human desire to feel at home into a vicious competition to gain exclusive access and privilege. As its blackmailed members learn, the closer to the center of the club one gets, the more fragile the illusion of “home” becomes.

One of the strongest suggestions that Home is not a home comes early in the novel when Adam meets with the disgruntled residents of the area. Ned has rigorously excluded them from the island and upended their once-peaceful village. He even purchased one of the two local pubs and gave it a “Home makeover” until “it looked like the kind of ersatz British boozer a successful expat actor might build for himself at the end of his LA garden. An expensive, knowing parody of itself. The locals had not been impressed” (62). The décor (like the locals) is displaced from somewhere that it might be more at home. Instead of a neighborhood joint, he creates a self-conscious, member-exclusive tribute to a neighborhood joint that belongs more to Hollywood than to this part of Britain.

As the head of membership, Annie understands—and exploits—the power of a longing for home. Her part of the story opens as she fields calls from Home’s members, all desperate to get into the launch party and most disappointed. The important distinction isn’t simply between members and non-members. Citing a former editor, she thinks of fame as “a series of roped-off rooms, each more exclusive than the last, the whole thing as hierarchical as high school” (68). This image is antithetical to an inclusive idea of home. Later, when cleaning Jackson’s room, Jess finds the blackmail victim’s new fee schedule: “The letter was from the Home Group, welcoming him to some new exclusive level of top-tier global membership. At the bottom of the letter it said, in much smaller print, how much it was going to cost, annually, in perpetuity” (93). The inner sanctum is a place of greater vulnerability rather than safety. The characters must pay more and more to chase the precarious idea of home.

Constructing and Revising Personal Narratives

All the main characters have secrets and stories about their pasts that drive the novel. These narratives help them to survive trauma and move forward, but they are continually interrogated. To move forward, Jess and Nikki confront and revise their pasts. Annie and Adam try to bury theirs and are destroyed in the attempt.

From the outset of the novel, Nikki has already begun to revise her story. Age has brought her perspective on the crimes of the man who impregnated her when she was 15. She also understands her past self differently: the “things she had accepted as truths, things that had gone to make up part of her sense of self” (230). Her renewed “sense of self” highlights the novel’s suggestions about the way personal narratives can be revised. Upon realizing that Kurt is her son, she investigates and discards her memories of Ned as a father figure. Lloyd replaces one abusive parental relationship with the potential for a new one with Kurt.

Jess has clung to her narrative regarding her father’s death, holding tighter in light of the world’s dismissal. As a child, she recognized Jackson Crane as Captain Aquatic, one of his roles. Her age and the slippage between fiction and reality make it easy to discredit her, and she grows angry—even murderous. She crafts a new story around the story of the accident: “[M]aybe one of the ways she dealt with it was by thinking of herself as some kind of detective, Nancy Drew, solving the mystery, her parents’ murder, like in one of her books” (220). This reference to “books” is a metafictional technique that draws attention to the fact that the novel itself is constructing and revising narratives. However, Jess never questions one of the central premises of her conclusion: that Georgia was the woman in the car. Obsessed by an incorrect story, she nearly reenacts a version of the original crime by killing Jackson and destroying his wife. After confronting Georgia, she finally realizes that Annie is to blame. Her final solution exposes rather than repeats the fatal narrative.

Adam and Annie, on the other hand, lie to both others and themselves. The Vanity Fair article that frames the novel is Annie’s version of the traumatic events surrounding the launch party. Incomplete and occasionally false, she leads the reporter, and hence the reader, through her story, allowing Lloyd to offer red herrings to the reader. As for Adam, Ned points out his hypocrisy. In Adam’s final moments, he accepts the truth of Ned’s words:

We all have versions of ourselves that we can bear to look at, versions we prepare for the world’s consumption, that we hope will make ourselves loved, allow us to be forgiven. Versions of our real selves that allow us to live with the things we have done (172).

Many “versions” of Adam are presented throughout the novel by different characters, and Lloyd presents irony in that Adam dies and leaves his legacy up to someone else’s “version” of him.