“Author, Author” by David Lodge is the fourth and final book to round out the theme of “Real Lives in Fiction” for the Monday Book Club.

The book club will examine the life of author Henry James through a somewhat “face-on” look at some of the facts of his life. However, Lodge sets up our view of James by selecting certain parts of his life that exemplify the conflicts and disappointments that James felt both about his writing and his relationships. The book club will meet to discuss Lodge’s 2005 novel at 6 p.m. April 24 at Taylor Books.

The major part of the novel focuses on James’ friendship with George Du Maurier, a cartoonist for Punch magazine. During the time covered by “Author, Author,” Du Maurier wrote one of the best-selling novels of all time. “Trilby” was the kind of inferior literature that Henry James would have been embarrassed to write.

Lodge invites us to speculate about what writing meant to James and how his own vision of what he put on the page reflected his sense of identity. But even though James aspired to be the “writer for the ages,” he was envious of the popularity of “Trilby,” a page-turning tour through dramatic situations involving a singer under the spell of a villain named Svengali.

Lodge

It was that drive to achieve some fame that led James to write the play that is alluded to in the title of Lodge’s novel. “Guy Domville” was a crashing failure, so much so that James was booed when he appeared to take his bow. James had gone to the Haymarket Theater to see Oscar Wilde’s new play, “An Ideal Husband,” arriving at his own play at the St. James just in time for what he anticipated as appreciative cries of “Author! Author!”

Lodge’s James is both convinced of his literary mission and wishfully envious of the popular success of Du Maurier. This internal dichotomy sets up the other major concern of the novel and of James’ real life, his maintenance of friendships.

The other featured friendship in this novel is that with novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper. She and James had a relationship that Leon Edel in his biography of James has described as “cautious intimacy.” It was cautious enough that they destroyed almost all their letters to each other by mutual agreement. They were friends for 14 years until Woolson committed suicide. James seemed to feel that he had failed her, that he was somehow responsible for her death.

Lodge’s novel about James expects us as readers to consider what it means to be a serious writer rather than just a popular one. It also presents the problem of how writers must navigate their way through a world of friendships in which every person dear to them is a possible subject.

As they read “Author, Author,” book club discussion participants might want to speculate about what it means to have an artistic mission and what differences there are in the manifestations of genius in art.

Carol Campbell leads the discussion of the Monday Book Club, which meets at 6 p.m. on the last Monday of every month at Taylor Books, 221 Capitol St.