Stephen King Setting, Jane Austen Interaction

Yesterday, on the way to volunteering, a train on the track next to us derailed. It was rather undramatic, though I'm sure it was shocking for those in the displaced compartment. We stopped and eventually the fire department turned off the power. Moments like that (or book groups or church-led mini retreats), I flash to Stephen King novels. I love how he throws people together in chance situations. Boarding the train, we didn't really see each other, though I did notice the slight, well-dressed man with no wedding band and the young guy with a Roman nose who looked like my old housemate Jon. But then, with the lights and air conditioning off and the heat and body odor rising, we looked up, and there we were, twenty strangers stuck together in a train compartment in the middle of a day early in May. It was like the beginning to a Stephen King story.

But it was Jane who was to be the author of the hour. After the initial surprise of the derailment, I placidly returned to Elizabeth's first sighting of Pemberly, and the shock of encountering Darcy, who proceeded to charm relations, reader, and Eliza at once. And then--"May I borrow your magazine?" the well-dressed lawyer man was looking at me.

"Why, certainly," I would've said if I were Elizabeth, startled from my novel.

"Oh, sure," was what I actually said, and then, seeing him flip through the pages aimlessly, I directed him to Ariel Levy's piece on cat breeding. He was appalled at the mention of half-eaten siamese cat heads, and told me he had a chihuahua, which he would be devastated to find eaten by a thirty-pound cat.

When people started filling our car from the derailed train, he moved to sit with me, which was considerate, seeing as he was holding my New Yorker. "I saw you reading her," he gestured to P&P, "And I thought: There's someone prepared for the CTA! She's one of my favorite authors." What a delight! With Jane, you can find a friend anywhere, I think. He told me Emma was his favorite, which garnered my instant respect, as I've recently been impressed with Deresiewicz's appraisal of it. To my exclaiming on the subtlety of her masterpiece, he sort of shrugged and said: "I just liked the story." He read Northanger Abbey last summer, and when I praised its humor he responded with his pleasure in the fact that it all ended up ok.

There are as many ways to enjoy Austen as there are people you will encounter in a stalled train.