Austen-tatious
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE GETS SMARTPHONES AND CROSSFIT IN CURTIS SITTENFELD’S MODERN RETELLING
Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice Curtis Sittenfeld Random House 512 pp; $37
Astory as classic as Pride and Prejudice can expect to see countless inadequate reinterpretations in its future, so many of them, in fact, that Jane Austen’s cautionary tale of Elizabeth Bennet, her sisters and one Mr. Darcy has practically become an English fable.
The l ast decade alone has seen Elizabeth tackle everything from zombies to Bollywood, with Pride and Prejudice regurgitated so often for ( rarely) better and ( frequently) worse, that annual reboots are to be expected. But Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, which transports the Bennet sisters from 19th- century England to the present day in the author’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, borrows more from Bridget Jones and the 2012 YouTube adaptation created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, thrusting smart phones into the sisters’ hands and CrossFit into their social schedules.
A master at writing about social class and American privilege, Sittenfeld ( Prep, American Wife) is a modern variation on Austen herself. She is a welcome addition to HarperCollins The Austen Project, a series pairing six bestselling contemporary authors with Austen’s six complete works: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility (Joanna Trollope), Northanger Abbey ( Val McDermid), Emma (Alexander McCall Smith), Persuasion, Mansfield Park — the last two pairings still to be determined.
As Eligible opens, Liz and Jane, the eldest and closest siblings of the Bennet family, have spent the last decade living in New York City; Liz as a 38-year-old magazine writer and Jane, nearly 40, as a yoga teacher. They’re brought back home to Cincinnati to help their drollas- ever father recover from heart surgery, only to find their uppity mother hopelessly spending money the family no longer has — and sisters Lydia, Mary and Kitty none the wiser. Meanwhile, the family’s sprawling and neglected Tudor is falling apart in its old age, a metaphor if there ever was one. It quickly becomes apparent to Liz that the home, and the family, are in disarray.
Romance is not too far from the plot, of course, with Mrs. Bennet’s only remaining hope being to marry her daughters into money. So far things look grim: Liz is trapped in an affair with a hopeless, married man ( Jasper Wick, a. k. a. Mr. Wickham) she’s been desperately in love with for nearly two decades and Jane has been single for so long she’s resorted to the very modern route of attempting artificial insemination from anonymous sperm donors.
So who should come calling but Chip Bingley and Fitzwilliam Darcy? Two Ivy League grads, the first is a former contestant on the reality show Eligible (à la The Bachelor), and the second is a grumpy, arrogant surgeon who is the best in his field. Heat is quick to follow for Jane and Chip, but for Liz and Darcy, the smouldering love that Austenites know best takes its time to manifest, as Liz attempts to reconcile her feelings for a longtime love with something new that doesn’t look quite like love at all.
She describes Darcy at their first meeting as looking “like a model in a local department store newspaper insert: handsome, yes, but moody in a rather preposterous and unnecessary way.” His superiority triggers her defences, but also her dry wit. This Liz remains feisty. Jane remains unfailingly sweet, and the sisters are still as maddening but equally entertaining as in the original. Meanwhile Mr. Darcy remains, well, to put it in modern words, a douche. But a handsome douche.
As Liz and Darcy’s heated dynamic evolves from an undeniable but angry chemistry to hate sex to what just might be love, there is no question of will- they- won’t- they. Premarital sex no longer comes at a prohibitive price, and marriage is no longer a woman’s sole goal, taking away a central conflict in Pride and Prejudice, and leaving a space that never quite gets filled by Sittenfeld.
However, while Eligible may be slightly contrived in its efforts to be fresh on the uptake — as if Sittenfeld pulled out a checklist to ensure the book covered each signature step toward ultimate literary rom- com candy ( e. g., Liz’s magazine job, perfunctory for female characters on the whimsical hunt for a husband) — the modern setting still allows the monumental romance some of its original lustre: the slow heartbreak, the waiting and the pain of relationships, a credible complexity.
Does the world need another Jane Austen love child? No, and it never did. But as lived-in as the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy may be, Eligible is nonetheless a fast and satisfying read.
Touching on everything from racism t o homophobia to ( of course) gender wars, Eligible does its best to be everything, including its predecessor, Pride and Prejudice — never quite getting deep enough into the latter for all its attempts to stay light and contemporary. But it doesn’t matter, because by the time you’ve quickly devoured Sittenfeld’s witty rework, you won’t have noticed.
MR. DARCY REMAINS, IN MODERN WORDS, A DOUCHE. BUT A HANDSOME DOUCHE