‘Eligible,’ Curtis Sittenfeld’s Update of Jane Austen
|
Version 0 of 1. ELIGIBLEBy Curtis Sittenfeld492 pp. Random House. $28. Jane Austen hasn’t written a new book in 200 years, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to resurrect, recast and reimagine her old ones. “Pride and Prejudice,” in particular, has enjoyed a full and occasionally wacko afterlife. It’s been a Bollywood extravaganza (“Bride & Prejudice”), an undead-themed novelty novel (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), a frothy homage (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and, best of all, a BBC mini-series that established the universal truth that a billowy poet’s blouse is one hot garment on a man, if the blouse is wet and the man is Colin Firth. Now comes Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Eligible,” which moves the story to that roiling hotbed of societal intrigue, the Cincinnati suburbs. As in the police lineup scene in “The Usual Suspects,” in which the characters recite the same phrase in wildly different ways, the fun lies in the variations on the theme. How can the author take a classic script — basically, a silly woman plots to marry off her five unwed daughters, couples fall in and out of love, and situations are dissected by a narrator of uncommon wit and perspicacity — and make it her own? So while Sittenfeld’s Mrs. Bennet retains the original’s misplaced snobbery and self-pity, she is in this version also a lover of trash television. Her current preoccupations include an addiction to a “Bachelor”-like reality show called “Eligible,” which does double duty as the novel’s title. (One of the great recurring jokes of the book is that everyone watches the show but pretends not to.) Meanwhile, Mr. Bingley, the good-natured landowner of “Pride and Prejudice,” is here awarded a new first name, Chip, and makes his initial appearance wearing a pair of doofy seersucker shorts. Chip, an emergency-room doctor, has recently appeared on “Eligible” as the resident bachelor — whether freely or under coercion from his ambitious sister/manager is an open question. He has exited the series still unattached, which makes him, conveniently, a single man in want of a wife. Mr. Darcy is also a doctor, a snooty neurosurgeon from San Francisco wondering why he has pitched up in a place as provincial as Cincinnati. Called Darcy, because “Fitzwilliam” is such a mouthful, he keeps fit by running, a pastime that allows him plenty of opportunities to encounter Liz Bennet so they can flirt, insult, and have satisfyingly explosive “hate sex” with each other. (Combative relationships are much more eventful in the early 21st century than they were in the early 19th.) As for Liz, a magazine writer who lives in New York: She’s still clever and responsible, the most perceptive member of the generally hopeless Bennet family, the one who has to sort everything out. Not that things are going so well for her. She’s been strung along for years by the evil Jasper Wick (the updated Mr. Wickham), who sleeps with her between official romances, doling out the occasional crumb of affection. “I love you,” he says to her at one ghastly point, “in my life.” The book begins when Liz and her older sister, Jane, a nearly 40 yoga instructor, return temporarily to Cincinnati after their father’s heart surgery. They find a nest of troubles: The family is heavily in debt; no one is paying attention to their father’s health; the house is sliding into ruin; and their birdbrained younger sisters are unemployed and living at home. Mary is pursuing her third online master’s degree; Kitty and Lydia spend a lot of their time at the CrossFit gym. (“Another source of irritation,” Liz notes, “was that her sisters looked fantastic.”) It’s a pleasure to find out how Sittenfeld has updated classic Austen scenes to fit this new milieu. In “Pride and Prejudice,” Elizabeth responds to the disparaging remarks made by Mr. Darcy by repeating them “with great spirit among her friends.” In “Eligible,” Liz confronts Darcy on the spot. “I’ve heard we grade on a curve here,” she says, referring to his criticisms of the women of Cincinnati in relation to the women of San Francisco, “so I’m probably what — more like a B for the coasts? Or a B-minus? If you have a minute to figure it out, be sure to let me know.” Likewise, Sittenfeld has set the Bennet family self-humiliation scene not at a ball at Netherfield, as Austen did, but at a party in which the Bennet girls play charades against a group that includes Chip, his sister and Darcy. As Mary ineffectually attempts to convey “Legends of the Fall” by making flailing waterfall-like motions in the general vicinity of her midsection, the two youngest girls provide a stream of mortifying guesses. “Going pee!” Kitty shouts. “Exploding with diarrhea!” Lydia cries. “Having your period!” No one writes with Austen’s particular sensibility, and no one would really want to; she was perfectly of her time. But Sittenfeld, whose four previous novels include the extraordinary “American Wife,” a devastating portrait of a Laura Bush-like first lady, is the ideal modern-day reinterpreter. Her special skill lies not just in her clear, clean writing, but in her general amusement about the world, her arch, pithy, dropped-mike observations about behavior, character and motivation. She can spot hypocrisy, cant, self-contradiction and absurdity 10 miles away. She’s the one you want to leave the party with, so she can explain what really happened. “Eligible” is the fourth in a series in which contemporary authors take on Austen’s six completed novels (so far, we’ve had the British writers Alexander McCall Smith, Joanna Trollope and Val McDermid on “Emma,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Northanger Abbey”) and very much the best. Taking the story out of England and bringing it to America has allowed Sittenfeld to draw back the curtains, throw open the windows, and let the air in, along the way lightly touching on such current topics as the cost of health care, artificial insemination, transgender and interracial relationships, and the unreality of reality television. The characters can be raucous and the situations ungenteel, but not since “Clueless,” which transported “Emma” to Beverly Hills, has Austen been so delightedly interpreted. Austen divided “Pride and Prejudice” into many short chapters, some just a few pages long, and Sittenfeld has followed that format in her much longer book, so that “Eligible” has a full 181 chapters. At times, this makes for episodic, choppy reading, and some of the peripheral plot points (a spider infestation, for instance) could have been cleared up a little more snappily. But Sittenfeld writes so well — her sentences are so good and her story so satisfying — that you don’t really care. In one of the classic scenes in “Pride and Prejudice,” Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth that he loves her while also delineating the reasons he shouldn’t marry her. In “Eligible,” Darcy is even more blunt. “You’re not beautiful, and you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” he proclaims. “You’re a gossip fiend who tries to pass off your nosiness as anthropological interest in the human condition.” (“Sorry,” Liz replies, “but I still consider you a jackass.”) This is a joke at Sittenfeld’s own expense, since she’s written much of the book from Liz’s point of view, in what sounds like a stand-in for her own voice. As a reader, let me just say: Three cheers for Curtis Sittenfeld and her astute, sharp and ebullient anthropological interest in the human condition. |