The Club

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).