Review

After their father has a heart attack, journalist Liz Bennet and her sister Jane, a yoga instructor, return home to Cincinnati to help oversee his convalescence and check over the declining family fortunes, while their mother shops online and organises a charity luncheon. Their three younger sisters, meanwhile, continue blithely on with their own selfish preoccupations: Lydia and Kitty’s lives revolve around CrossFit, the paleo diet and parties, while Mary spends most of her time shut in her bedroom undertaking multiple university degrees. Although the youngest, Lydia, is 23, none of them have jobs and all of them live a heavily subsidised existence at home.

At a Lucas family BBQ, Liz and Jane meet a couple of upper class, wealthy and handsome doctors: Chip Bingley, a handsome former star of Eligible, a Bachelor-esque reality dating show, and his surgeon friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, whose appalling arrogance about Cincinnati and rude words about Liz put her off from the outset. Jane and Chip start dating, and Mrs Bennet is ecstatic. But the course of true love never did run smooth…

*

I love Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen in general, so having discovered how much I enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing, I decided to read Eligible. And I loved it, absolutely devoured it. It’s well written, funny and keenly observed. As with all appropriations, there’s the pleasure of seeing how the original has been both echoed and changed. Because this is set in contemporary US, there are none of the original’s Regency social restrictions, so what causes restrictions, misunderstandings and upset now? Sittenfeld tackles contemporary attitudes to class, money, race, gender and sexuality, almost entirely from Liz’s third person subjective point of view. I also enjoyed what felt like a peek into the workings of a Bachelor-like reality TV show. The final chapter, which felt like a postscript, was unexpected, but I think also serves to examine or unsettle the social assumptions of the original novel.

Great fun for Austen fans, year 10 & up. 544 pp.

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A few sex scenes with minimal/no detail; scattering of casual/humorous swears, e.g. f-words, s-words; various vulgarities, courtesy of Lydia and Kitty; some homophobic remarks (criticised); some covert racism (criticised); some fatphobic comments (implicitly criticised); heart attack; shopping addiction; secret debts; infidelity; IUI fertility treatments and single motherhood; secret relationship with married (but separated) person; spider infestation; brief mention of a paid sexual encounter; a character has anorexia. Main and minor romances are mlw. Most characters are white and middle class; characters are straight, trans and asexual.

*

Sittenfeld, C. (2017). Eligible. HarperCollins Publishers.

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