Jane Austen meets ‘The Bachelor’
Scrutinizing eligible men for fun and profit — and our entertainment — did not begin with “The Bachelor.” Jane Austen’s novels dramatized this pastime so artfully and with such wit that nearly every succeeding romantic comedy points somehow in her direction.
Austen’s fiction has inspired countless homages, pastiches and remakes of varying degrees of fundamentalism. Now Curtis Sittenfeld, in her new novel “Eligible,” transports the Bennet family of “Pride and Prejudice,” including the five unmarried sisters, to the suburbs of contemporary Cincinnati, Sittenfeld’s hometown, and to the reality-TV era.
Sittenfeld’s earlier novels include “Prep” and “American Wife.”
Sittenfeld said an editor at the British arm of HarperCollins pitched her the idea of writing a modern-day “Pride and Prejudice” as part of the publisher’s Austen Project. “Pretty much as soon as I started rereading ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I thought this would be incredibly fun,” she said.
When an unmarried bachelor arrived in a small 19th-century English village, everybody knew about it right away. But how would people in Cincinnati today know if such a man turned up, Sittenfeld wondered.
“Well,” she said, “if he had been on a reality-TV show like ‘The Bachelor,’ it would make people know who he is, it would give him some celebrity and it would mean that they knew he was single.”
Chip Bingley, the Harvard-educated doctor who moves into the Bennets’ orbit, has not only appeared on such a TV show, called “Eligible” he also graced it with an emotional meltdown during the finale. Crybaby or not, he looks like a golden catch to Mrs. Bennet, to which her husband tartly replies, “if a sock puppet with a trust fund and a Harvard medical degree moved here, you’d think he was meant to marry one of our girls.”
While Jane, the oldest Bennet daughter, is 22 in Austen’s novel, perilously close to spinsterhood in that era, Sittenfeld has pushed the Bennets’ ages up to more reasonable ones for our time. Jane, almost 40, and Liz, 38, have both come home from New York to help during their father’s recovery from a medical crisis, Mrs. Bennet being just as useless in this novel as she was in the original.
Sittenfeld has suitably, and often wittily, refashioned the characters for our crazy time as well. Bingley’s colleague Darcy is a neurosurgeon. Cousin Willie is a wealthy tech savant devoid of social skills and emotional intelligence. Kathy de Burgh is a famous feminist who Liz Bennet is desperately trying to reach for a magazine article.
And in a novel filled with exchanges sharp enough to make Niles and Frasier Crane take notice, look out for the scenes with Mr. Bennet. Responding to a male nurse who greets him with institutional enthusiasm, the elder Bennet replies, “Bernard! We’re mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?”
“‘Eligible’ is supposed to be an act of homage, an act of admiration,” Sittenfeld said. “It’s not supposed to be an improvement upon ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”
While she admired Austen’s fiction in the past, Sittenfeld would not call herself a Janeite (common parlance for people who treat Austen’s fiction as a lifestyle guide). Before starting on “Eligible,” “I had never rented an Empire-waist dress,” she said. (But she has since.)
She had also only seen occasional moments of “The Bachelor.” But after she began this novel, she watched two entire seasons.
“I completely understand why people get hooked,” Sittenfeld said. “It’s a bit like someone who starts smoking (for) a movie and, like, 30 years later, is still smoking.”