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| Hardcover, 492 pages Published 2016 Acquired December 2016 Read June 2019 |
This is a re-telling of Pride and Prejudice, but that's not why I read it; I read it as part of a mission to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati. Sittenfeld grew up in Hyde Park, and even though she hasn't lived there in her adult life, her brother PG Sittenfeld is a member of city council. The local color is pretty good: Darcy and Liz bump into each other at Skyline, people are always making out-of-towners try Graeter's raspberry chip, and the Bennets size up a sister's potential by asking where he went to high school. It's much more East Side than the Cincinnati I grew up in, but Sittenfeld gets the vibe of the richer-than-you East Side families pretty good. (As snobs, they are of course offended when someone from a coastal state like Darcy is snobby to them.) The mother in particular felt like a real Hyde Park woman, with he slightly concealed casual racism. So that was fun, although the last quarter of the novel largely abandons the Cincinnati setting.
As a novel otherwise, it's okay. Its cardinal sin is that I don't think the antagonism between Liz and Darcy comes across like it ought; he's an outright asshole to her in scene one, but from then on he's behaves so mildly toward her it's hard to see why she's mad. And I think that's the point (I haven't reread Pride and Prejudice since early in my M.A., so my memory is foggy), but Sittenfeld doesn't convince you that Liz would be so negative toward him. Whereas he kinda feels like he's barely there! There's a lot of good tie-ins to contemporary issues, but the way reality tv takes over the plot in the final quarter feels very implausible and out there. I also felt there was a lot of clunky exposition in the beginning, and contrived circumstances, designed to get the reader up to speed on why five unmarried women would still be living with their parents.
I did really laugh loudly at the epilogue, though, so there's that.
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