(Combative relationships are much more eventful in the early 21st century than they were in the early 19th.)Īs for Liz, a magazine writer who lives in New York: She’s still clever and responsible, the most perceptive member of the generally hopeless Bennet family, the one who has to sort everything out. Called Darcy, because “Fitzwilliam” is such a mouthful, he keeps fit by running, a pastime that allows him plenty of opportunities to encounter Liz Bennet so they can flirt, insult, and have satisfyingly explosive “hate sex” with each other. Darcy is also a doctor, a snooty neurosurgeon from San Francisco wondering why he has pitched up in a place as provincial as Cincinnati. He has exited the series still unattached, which makes him, conveniently, a single man in want of a wife.

Chip, an emergency-room doctor, has recently appeared on “Eligible” as the resident bachelor - whether freely or under coercion from his ambitious sister/manager is an open question.

Bingley, the good-natured landowner of “Pride and Prejudice,” is here awarded a new first name, Chip, and makes his initial appearance wearing a pair of doofy seersucker shorts. (One of the great recurring jokes of the book is that everyone watches the show but pretends not to.) Her current preoccupations include an addiction to a “Bachelor”-like reality show called “Eligible,” which does double duty as the novel’s title. Bennet retains the original’s misplaced snobbery and self-pity, she is in this version also a lover of trash television. How can the author take a classic script - basically, a silly woman plots to marry off her five unwed daughters, couples fall in and out of love, and situations are dissected by a narrator of uncommon wit and perspicacity - and make it her own?

As in the police lineup scene in “The Usual Suspects,” in which the characters recite the same phrase in wildly different ways, the fun lies in the variations on the theme. Now comes Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Eligible,” which moves the story to that roiling hotbed of societal intrigue, the Cincinnati suburbs. It’s been a Bollywood extravaganza (“Bride & Prejudice”), an undead-themed novelty novel (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), a frothy homage (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and, best of all, a BBC mini-series that established the universal truth that a billowy poet’s blouse is one hot garment on a man, if the blouse is wet and the man is Colin Firth. “Pride and Prejudice,” in particular, has enjoyed a full and occasionally wacko afterlife. Jane Austen hasn’t written a new book in 200 years, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to resurrect, recast and reimagine her old ones.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld