Novel Readings

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” –  Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice

“I’m in love with you. It’s probably an illusion caused by the release of oxytocin during sex, but I feel as if I’m in love with you.” Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Eligible

Just to be clear, I know that Curtis Sittenfeld’s “modern retelling” of Pride and Prejudice isn’t actually called Ineligible. It’s called Eligible, which is also the name of the reality TV show (closely modeled on The Bachelor) on which her updated Mr. Bingley has recently been a contestant.

I read Eligible with the sincere intention of reviewing it for the June issue of Open Letters. It turns out, however, that I have reached my limit for the number of mediocre-to-terrible novels based on, inspired by, or in any way re-imagining great 19th-century fiction that I can stand to write about in thoughtful detail. There may yet be exceptions, books that promise the rare kind of brilliance shown in, say, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, books that just look so inviting that after swearing I’m out, they pull me back in. But for now, I’m done. I don’t set out to dislike these books, honest! It’s just that over and over they disappoint me at best (as you’ll see in my forthcoming review of Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon) and at worst they infuriate me (remember Gwendolen?). And at least Eliot (and Brontë) spin-offs, which are uninspiring enough, are happily relatively infrequent. The endless, unstoppable, unbearable parade of zombie versions (literal and figurative) of Austen’s novels, however, shows no sign of ever, ever, ever ending, and at this point it all just seems crass — an embarrassing reflection on both the publishing industry and the readers who keep buying such derivative, second-rate, opportunistic substitutions for authentic creativity and genuine insight.

Harumph.

OK, now that I’ve got that rant out of my system, let me be more temperate. I’ve enjoyed some Austen pastiches in my time: Jane Austen in Boca is fun enough, for instance, and so is Bridget Jones’s Diary (though Mad About the Boy was just awful). Clueless is both smart and entertaining. And other people can of course read as much sub-Austen fiction as they want, and if they enjoy it, more power to them and they can rest easy knowing they will apparently never (ever!) run out of options. But as far as I’m concerned, the two best rewritings of Pride and Prejudice are North and South and Daniel Deronda (I have an essay about Deronda as a response to Austen’s happy endings, in fact, that I hope to place somewhere eventually), and Eligible is not in their class at all — or even in Fielding’s. It’s not a horrible novel — in its own way, it’s even diverting. It just doesn’t rethink Pride and Prejudice in any interesting way: it’s like a weirdly literal attempt at translation in which every element of the original novel has been replaced with what Sittenfeld came up with as its modern equivalent (Mr. Darcy is a brain surgeon! Bingley is a reality TV heart throb! Lydia destroys her mother’s peace of mind by marrying someone who’s transgender! Lady Catherine de Bourgh is Kathy de Bourgh, feminist icon — wait, what?!) — and in the conversion process, the magic is utterly lost.

There are some clever things about Eligible, and some funny bits in it. That’s as much as I can really say in its favor, though — which isn’t much, but is just enough to make it not deserving of a hatchet job. So what could a longer review really say about it? My overwhelming feeling, reading it, was indifference: why write it? why read it? when you could write — or read — something else? It offers so very little, not just but especially in comparison to Pride and Prejudice itself. Beneath Austen’s deft social comedy we feel the earth moving — emotionally and politically. There are elements of social change in Eligible too, but the novel reads as if Sittenfeld had a checklist of ways to demonstrate that the times are a’changing. Austen’s prose may seem old-fashioned to some readers today, but its subtlety and wit make it well worth attuning our ear to its cadences. Sittenfeld’s prose is serviceable, but so what? And sometimes it isn’t even that — but since I’m not writing that hatchet job, I’ll stop there.

The thing is, I know that having some expertise in the original 19th-century materials in a way makes me perfectly suited to examine contemporary reworkings of them, which is one reason I have stepped up to do it so often. At the same time, that’s exactly what turns out to make the process so tedious: ironically, my “qualifications” make this exactly the wrong niche for me as a reviewer — they make me ineligible for it. I don’t shy away from writing negative reviews: I hope I always have the courage to say quite honestly what I think about what I’ve read, as well as the integrity to give as full an explanation as I can of why I think it. Dwelling in negativity isn’t the most rewarding kind of reviewing, though — and specializing in books that get our attention by being parasitic on greatness isn’t a niche anybody really wants to inhabit, is it? It’s one I want to move out of, at any rate.

And when the inevitable film adaptation of Eligible is released, I won’t go see it, either. Enough! I’ve had enough.

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Hate sex, she thought gleefully. Hate sex! Except without the hate! — Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible