Pride and Prejudice and Yentas - cameo by Saul Bellow

Jane Austen in Boca (2002) by Paula Marantz Cohen is the only novel I've ever read featuring a blurb by Joan Rivers. Cohen is an English Professor who has now written three novels, all quite funny, all romances wrapped around plots borrowed from elsewhere. I wrote a bit about the other two, Much Ado About Jesse Kaplan, and Jane Austen in Scarsdale, or Love, Death, and the SATs, back here.

This one is Pride and Prejudice set in a Boca Raton retirement community. Is it necessary to say "Jewish retirement community"? I didn't think so. It's Boca Raton, FL, for Pete's sake.

So Elizabeth Bennet becomes Flo, a widow, a former University of Chicago librarian. Sweeter, prettier sister Jane becomes May, Flo's sweeter, prettier friend. Darcy is a curmudgeonly retired English professor at Florida Atlantic University, who falls for Elizabeth, sorry, Flo, because she's interesting. Other correspondences are created, modified, or discarded as needed. Great fun, and mostly just an excuse to put a plot around a gentle, humorous novel about life in a Florida retirement community.

Near the end of the book, Darcy, no, Stan, leads a seminar on Pride and Prejudice at the retirement community. I suspect the resulting chapter is nothing more than a transcription from Paula Marantz Cohen's own seminar. Some samples:

"Once you get used to the Old English, it reads very fast."

"I didn't know they were sarcastic back then, but I guess being sarcastic isn't necessarily modern."

"I had four sisters, too. My mother didn't stop shvitzing until we were all married. I feel for that Mrs. Bennet."

One more, and I'll stop:

"'Herb was like that [like Mr. Bennet] with the children ,' noted Dorothy Meltzer, whose deeply tanned visage was decorated with several Band-Aids marking the removal of the latest basal-cell skin cancer. She wore them as proudly as a German officer sported his saber scars. 'He went into the den with a sandwich whenever Melissa and I would start screaming. Even now, when there's noise, he can't digest.'

Several women nodded. They, too, had known men to hide in the den with a sandwich. Mrs. Bennet had their sympathy." (p. 250)

Jane Austen in Boca is definitely in the chick lit genre, retiree subcategory. I maintain - prove me wrong! - that it's the only chick lit novel that features a cameo by Saul Bellow.* Now I've read all three of Paula Marantz Cohen's novels, still the only examples of chick lit I've read. One might think that I was slumming in my vacation reading. I was, but not with this clever, light novel. Next week, the slumming.

* Since Flo / Elizabeth was a librarian at the University of Chicago. That reminds me, I should tell my Saul Bellow story. So one time, around 1994 or 1995, I stood behind Bellow in the checkout line at the Regenstein library. I didn't realize it was him until he turned to leave, so I didn't see what books he had.

Yeah, that's the whole story.

Jane Austen in the Novels of Paula Marantz Cohen

An anonymous commenter spurs me to undo, or at least contradict, yesterday's misAustenic rantings.

English professor Paula Marantz Cohen has written three novels, two of them with Jane Austen in the title. In one respect, this is savvy marketing, bait for the Austen cult. But it is also truth in advertising. Cohen boldly steals Austen's plots, plunking them down in her own contemporary American, Jewish milieu. Because the plot is the least important part of any good novel,* this saves her a lot of time and energy.

Jane Austen in Scarsdale, or Love, Death, and the SATs is the latest one. The plot is that of Persuasion, cleverly moved to Westchester County, but the interest of the book is really in the subtitle. The Anne Elliot stand-in is head guidance counsellor at a wealthy school, and much of the book is satire about the lunatic competition by students and parents to get into top colleges. None of this has any relation to Jane Austen, and it is the best thing in the book.

Much Ado About Jesse Kaplan, which hangs off of Shakespeare rather than Austen, has an identical structure. There's a plot that is actually about Shakespeare sonnets - the heroine's mother begins to think that she is Shakespeare's Dark Lady - but the most fun lies in the insanity of preparing for an upper-class bat mitzvah. The caterer, the DJ, I don't remember what else. Really funny stuff.

Jane Austen in Boca is unread by me at this point. This one is Pride and Prejudice amongst Florida retirees.

Cohen is funny, the literary business is unobtrusive (in the Scarsdale book, anyway) but gives the story a little more juice, and the change of setting and character does not stomp on the original. Cohen understands Austen's moral setting - she updates rather than upends.

I think these are the only "chick lit" novels I've ever read.

Light reading should not mean the end of critical thinking.

*Outrageous and certainly wrong. The thickness of the paper is obviously less important than the plot. Upon reflection, I may come up with other examples.