Last year I unexpectedly enjoyed Pride and Prejudice during Cannonball Bingo; I decided to read Curtis Sittenfeld’s modern retelling because I have enjoyed several other books she’s written. Unfortunately this adaptation is often times hampered by its premise and would have been better served not trying to fit so tightly into an Austen shaped boxed. While I usually find myself screaming at film adaptations that stray too far from the original I actually wish Sittenfeld been a bit looser with her translation like Clueless, another Austen retelling,or She’s the Man, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Liz Bennett is a magazine writer living in New York who goes back home to Cleveland with her older sister, Jane, after their father suffers a heart attack. Liz, 38, and Jane, 40, are the only Bennett girls who have left the nest but they aren’t exactly thriving. Liz is dating a married friend while Jane is undergoing IUI treatments in hopes to become a single mom. The younger Bennett sisters, Kitty and Lydia, live in a state of arrested development devoting all their time to Crossfit while still living in their familial home and sister Mary continues to collect college diplomas without a plan to ever enter the workforce.
The title Eligible comes from the Bachelor-esq dating show Chip Bingley, a doctor Jane meets at a friend’s party, was on and is another clunky aspect of the adaptation. The reasoning for their breakup was a bit ridiculous even by romantic comedy standards. I did enjoy the relationship between Darcy and Liz; it felt rooted in a modern reality and still pretty true to the original love/hate relationship the famous duo had. Their story kept Eligible afloat and I would have happily read a shorter novel devoted almost exclusively to their hate-sex fueled romance.
“I’d think, One of the times she leaves will be the last time I see her. It destroyed me. I didn’t want us to have a last time, and that was how I realized I’d fallen in love with you.”
Aging the Bennett girls was a good way to modernize the peculiarity of all five girls being unmarried, although it still isn’t that uncommon for women in their late thirties to still be single, and I appreciated that Willie was a step-cousin instead of a full blown relation of Liz’s although his propositioning of her still seemed out of nowhere. The Bennett’s financial problems are more dire than in Pride and Prejudice and Mrs Bennett leans into the “prejudice” part of the title a bit harder than needed. She was easily the worst part of the novel.
Overall I thought this was a fun idea but Sittenfeld failed to stick the landing.
Spoiler: The handling of Lydia’s disgrace of the Bennett name by having her marry a successful, genuinely nice transgender man was one of the worst aspects of this novel. This decision led to Darcy describing being transgender as a birth defect similar to a cleft pallet as a way to mend the Bennett family and eventually reunite with Liz. I think there are so many other scenarios that Sittenfeld could have employed that would have equated to shacking up unmarried in the 1800s; something as easy as her running away with a high school drop out who worked at McDonald’s instead of a marrying a trans-gendered man. Darcy could have bought him a franchise of his own for him to run or something! It was just completely tone deaf.