Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love Jane Austen, but I’m not a rabid purist. I’ve enjoyed plenty of follow-ons to her various novels and I like lots of the different film and TV dramatizations. I was a little dubious about the announcement of The Austen Project, in which six contemporary authors would reimagine the Austen novels in the present day. So much of Austen depends on the exploration of the social conventions and class structure of its time, none of which can be readily translated to the modern day. But I like Curtis Sittenfeld’s work, so I thought Eligible would be worth reading. What a disappointment. There was little charm, romance or erotic tension in this too-modern retelling. The characters lack the nuance of Austen’s versions and are mostly just flat-out dislikable. Not Jane and Elizabeth, but neither are they the kind of warm or, in Elizabeth’s case, good-naturedly impertinent characters that Austen made them. The biggest problem for me is the sex. By making the eldest daughters nearing 40, it goes without saying that they will be sexually active. But Sittenfeld spends too much time on sexual situations and they’re not romantic or erotic. Here’s the worst, though: *******************SPOILER***************** Instead of having romantic/erotic tension between Elizabeth and Darcy, Sittenfeld has them go straight from animosity to “hate sex.” I just about threw the book across the room with that. *****************END SPOILER************** Though the sex issue was a big problem for me, it was just one of several aspects of Sittenfeld’s modernization that fell flat. Her Cousin William Collins is just as boring and inexplicably self-satisfied as Austen’s, but now, instead of being a clergyman, he’s a dot-com multi-millionaire. Sittenfeld’s Charles (now “Chip”) Bingley is much sought after not so much for his wealth, but because he’d been featured on the TV show, Eligible (essentially The Bachelor). Mrs. Bennet is less neurotic about her daughters’ marital status, but she does have a shopping addiction. Kitty and Lydia are just as frivolous as in Austen, but instead of being devoted to their attire and chasing militia men, they are addicted to Crossfit and Paleo diets. The Crossfit/Paleo theme probably falls the flattest of all Sittenfeld’s attempts to modernize the characters’ lives. There are still flashes of wit and some occasional clever dialog, and the last tenth or so has a certain madcap entertainment value, but most of the time this reads like someone working very hard to stitch together modern clothing for an old mannequin and not succeeding or enjoying the task very much. And the incongruous and unromantic/un-erotic sex pretty much ruined it for me. If you want to read a good modern retelling of an Austen novel, I’d go with Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport (Sense and Sensibility re-telling) instead.