Austen stuck in Cincinnati

It is a truth universally acknowledged that many a writer in want of a good romantic comedy plot has turned to Jane Austen. “Pride and Prejudice” alone has countless progeny — from the classic 1995 BBC adaptation, to more fanciful variations like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Twilight” (Pride and Prejudice and Vampires).

Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” showed it was possible to lift Austen’s storyline and create a funny contemporary novel about a spirited young woman in search of love, while reminding us that “Pride and Prejudice” was one of the original screwball comedies.

“Eligible,” by the best-selling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, is a “modern retelling” of “Pride and Prejudice,” commissioned by the Austen Project, which has been pairing contemporary authors with various Austen works. The novel is largely set in Cincinnati and stars Liz Bennet, her four sisters, their social-climbing mother and self-absorbed father, and the sisters’ assorted suitors.

Certainly, Sittenfeld possesses the gifts that might lend themselves to such an enterprise: an appraising eye for telling social and status details (“Prep”) and a persuasive ability to channel her characters’ inner lives (“American Wife” and “Sisterland”). And although there are glimpses of Sittenfeld’s storytelling talents, “Eligible” swiftly devolves into the glibbest sort of chick lit; it reads less like an homage than a heavy-handed and deeply unfunny parody. It has the passive-aggressive Liz Bennet proposing to Darcy that they have “hate sex,” and her sister Jane falling in love with Chip Bingley, star of a reality show called “Eligible” (think “The Bachelor”).

Throughout the novel, Sittenfeld italicizes the differences between women’s roles in the early 19th century and their place in society today — instead of underscoring the eternal emotional dynamics between men and women, which make Austen’s work so timeless.

It’s not just that many of Sittenfeld’s characters often seem more like the Kardashians than Austen heroines, but that the entire tone of this novel feels off: The layered satire and irony in “Pride and Prejudice” have been replaced with high-decibel mockery, just as Austen’s sense of irony has been supplanted by sophomoric jokes.

Jane Austen would not have been amused.