Genre: Fiction
Rating: ★★★★
Pages: 512
Published: 2016
Publisher: Random House
Like many Americans, I felt that I needed a little pick-me-up following Election Day this year. Alcohol didn't do me much good, break-up songs hit waaaay too close to home, and the platter of calamari I stress-ate Election Night was not sitting well with me.
So I did what any decent, red-blooded American capitalist does with emotional (and calamari-induced) pain — I dealt with my feelings by shopping.
Fifteen minutes and several enticing promises by Amazon Prime later, Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible was purchased and en route to my house. The fact that it was there before I got home was the surprisingly delicious icing on the dumpster fire cake that has so far been 2016.
I've been meaning to read Eligible for a while, but I didn't get serious about it until I read Sittenfeld's essay on The New Yorker, titled "My Friend Sam." Something about Sittenfeld's writing style reminded me of one of my good friends, Kiernyn, to the point where I decided that I just had to get my greedy little hamster hands on this book.
Eligible is one of six novels the Austen project (link), which seeks to pair Jane Austen's six novels with a contemporary (and critically-acclaimed) author in order to prove the timelessness of Jane Austen's stories. While several of the novels have so far received mixed reviews (Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey), Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice contribution was highly anticipated due to the blockbuster status of Pride and Prejudice within the literary world and Austen fandom. This New York Times article is a pretty solid interview with Sittenfeld about the project and about how she feels taking up the Pride and Prejudice mantle, so I'd recommend y'all reading it if you have a free minute (or 10).
*swats away background and baggage* K, let's get to the review.
Liz is a magazine writer in her late thirties who, like her older sister Jane (a yoga instructor) lives in New York City. When their father suffers a heart attack, the two women fly home to help around the house as their father recovers. Liz, usually the most perceptive Bennet of the bunch, is shocked at the state of things: their home is run down, their family's finances are perilous, their mother has an online shopping addiction, and her younger sisters — left to their own devices — are running amok.
Liz and Jane's return to Cincinnati is also marked by the appearance of Chip Bingley, a young doctor fresh from a wildly successful (and infamous) run on a reality television show (not-so-coincidentally named Eligible). Mrs. Bennet (always the meddler) decides that Chip Bingley is destined to marry Jane who, nearly forty, is practically a spinster (my heavens). Of course, as Jane and Bingley hit it off and their relationship heats up, Liz comes into contact with Chip's good friend, the ever-obnoxious and ever-handsome Darcy. And from there, as the reader and Liz learn, is how misleading first impressions can be.
The New York Time's Sarah Lyall says in this review of Eligible that Sittenfeld's decision to set the novel in the United States "let[s] the air in," in regards to interpreting Austen's classic story and characters, and I totally agree. As opposed to setting a modern-day retelling of P&P in England, I think that moving the Bennets to Cincinnati highlights the universality of these characters, their problems, and their faults.*
I loved Sittenfeld setting the novel in Cincinnati for a couple of reasons. First of all, as a Midwestern transplant, I always like to see a little more Midwestern love in the literary world.** Second, the Cincinnati setting is prefaced by a Mark Twain quote:
"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times."
Via.
This quote establishes Cincinnati as the stand-in for the backwater town Meryton where the wealthy Bingleys and Darcy find themselves. Darcy's discomfort with Cincinnati is what initially pits him against Elizabeth, as Liz overhears him talking about grading Cincinnati/Midwestern women "on a curve." Naturally, Liz is insulted, and uses this as the springboard for her dislike/hatred. This chip-on-the-shoulder attitude is familiar, I think, to Midwestern transplants who frequently feel that they have to defend their cities, towns, states, etc., on a regular basis. If nothing else, Sittenfeld's nearly anthropological statements about the Midwestern state of mind (she makes an especially salient point about what it means to ask someone where they went to high school) got me on her (and Liz's) side as the reader.
Like with the setting, Sittenfeld makes other ~~artistic choices~~ which modernize certain plot elements. Such as: the Bennet sisters being aged up (because not a lot of people consider themselves spinsters at 20 these days); the Meryton ball where Darcy and Elizabeth meet becoming a July 4th barbecue; and the infamous George Wickham being split into two characters, Jasper Wick (who has considerable baggage left over from his time at Stanford and has been leading Liz on for more than a decade by the start of the book) and Ham (the owner of a CrossFit gym who becomes Lydia's boyfriend).
I really liked Eligible. Even though it clocked in at over 180 chapters (!) and over 500 pages, I found that time flew by as I read it. Some of the shorter chapters made the actions a little choppy, or didn't contribute much to the overall plot (although they did arguably reveal bits about the characters), and some of the Cincinnati references were frustrating because they went over my head (like, "they ran to this neighborhood, and then this one, and then went to this famous Cincinnati restaurant for lunch"). But overall, I think that Sittenfeld did a really, really good job at bringing the Bennets (& Co.) into the modern era while being true to the spirit of the book. It didn't feel forced — the characters' interactions felt natural and true to form, even if there was 100% more CrossFit in this book than the original.
(Bottom line: You should read this book.)
You've probably seen this one before. Image (c) Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant
*The Lizzie Bennet Diaries does a really good job with this setting as well. Link here. And if Emma is more your speed, here is Hank Green and Bernie Su's second foray into Austenland with Emma Approved. (It took a while for EA to hook me, but once it did, boy was I in.)
** s/o to my short-lived Midwest Monday series.
