Posthumous Fame Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

by

Lev Raphael

Is there any kind of Jane Austen-related book that couldn't find an audience right now? Just surveying the crowded field makes me wish I had a team of ghostwriters who could help me put my name on a handful of Austen-y titles ASAP. 

The possibilities are endless. Persuasion: The Jane Austen Puppy Training Manual.  Northanger Baby: Raising a Child the Jane Austen Way. Sense and Sensitivity: The Therapist's Guide to Using Austen to Change Your Clients' Lives. Pride and Primulas: Austen in the Garden. Or maybe a mash-up: Austen Powers: International Author of Mystery. That one especially might catch the eye of fans of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

For all I know, some of these books I’ve fantasized are already in the works, or may even have been published. It's hard to keep up.  

Michael Thomas Ford wades into this surreal publishing craze with the entertaining Jane Bites Back, in which he also targets another cultural frenzy: the obsession with vampires. Stephanie Barron has carved out her own large part of the Austen market by making Austen a sleuth, so turning Jane into a vampire is hardly a stretch at this point, especially since Amanda George has already published two novels featuring Mr. Darcy as a vampire. Maybe we'll see Austen make a guest appearance on NCIS sometime soon, or even Jersey Shore.

So Austen is a vampire in Ford's clever book, and a cranky one, too. She's two hundred years old, living in a drab college town in upper New York State where she runs a book store that's a source of more misery than income. To her horror and chagrin, the Austen name is golden, will sell anything it's attached to—even finger puppets!—but she can't make any money from her fame except as a bookseller. You know it's hard out there for a vamp.

Then who does profit? Charlatans like Melodie Gladstone, author of Waiting for Mr. Darcy, which is not a bleakly funny mix of Beckett and Austen, but a smarmy self-help book that's helping the crass and hypocritical author far more than her fans, who have embraced the Austen-inflected claptrap about not giving yourself sexually to anyone until you find true love. It involves a club, signature silver lockets, and of course buying not only Gladstone's opus but a set of Austen's novels put out by the same publisher.

Even worse than all this gross capitalizing on her name, the new novel Austen's written has been rejected by 116 publishers. Ouch. It's an idea as chilling as it's comic, living to see one's posthumous fame but not being able to enjoy it, and then winding up trapped in publishing hell. Too bad the excerpts of this novel of Austen's that Ford offers us seem bland, and that we never even get a précis; that makes it doubly hard to believe when characters ultimately rave about the book. Constance, as it's called, certainly doesn't sound much like any of the Austen novels I've read and re-read over the years.

Okay, you're probably wondering: if Austen is undead, what about her illness and death witnessed by her family? Ford finesses the problem by having had vampire medicos and other helpers assist in a charade. It's all treated vaguely, but what isn't vague is how she came to be a vampire. Austen wrote a letter to Byron, they met in Switzerland at his invitation, he took her virginity and gave her the gift (or curse) of life outside most human limitations. All in all, an action-packed trip away from home. 

Byron's a busy poet/vampire, responsible for “turning” more authors than you might guess. It’s an amusing conceit, though Ford’s Byron doesn't have the wit and panache recorded by his contemporaries and revealed in his exuberant letters and journals; he's more a stock Gothic figure who helps the story keep moving since he arrives in Jane’s little town with an agenda. But characterization isn’t really Ford's forte, nor is setting. The book shifts from one fairly vague locale to another, all of it presented in prose that basically just gets the job done, though not always:

Jane closed her eyes. She was remembering too much. Things she had buried deep within her mind were rising to the surface. Memories. Images. Feelings. None of them welcome.

At moments like that, the book feels like it missed a final edit, though it’s easy to imagine Ford’s publisher rushing his satire into print based on the concept alone (and there are two more books in the series planned). That’s what happens to Jane—her book speeds towards publication. She’s incredibly lucky after all her disappointment to find an editor who not only wants her book ASAP, but puts her up in a New York hotel, takes her to lunch and dinner, and hardly has any significant edits to offer.  

Publishers Weekly claims that Jane endures the “indignities of publishing,” but it all sounds like an author’s dream come true. At lunch her hottie editor keeps upping the royalty rate when she hesitates, they sign the contract that same day, and the cover design is already done (she’s impressed, but it sounds drab). Then poor dead Jane has to deal with people complimenting her on the street back home; almost uniformly rave reviews; a first printing boosted from 50,000 to 100,000; an invitation to appear on a famous daytime talk show; and her book debuting at no. 1 on the New York Times best seller list. The horror! The horror!

Ford’s Jane is what you might expect of the author-turned vampire: prim, conflicted, a lady who’s forgotten how to be a woman in the years since she was “turned,” as someone points out to her. Does she seem like an author? She certainly has the hunger, as ravenous as her thirst for blood. And like a number of current vampires who are less rule-bound than that old fuddy duddy Count Dracula, Jane can eat and drink (without gaining weight), and sunlight doesn’t kill her, though bright TV studio lights have a sickening effect. Ford gets good comedy out of Austen being dead: in a moment of despair, she moans, “I wish I were dead. I mean undead. No. Un-undead.” 

In this novel where romance often outweighs satire, Jane has one love interest, one possible love interest, and then there’s Byron who plays surprising roles throughout. The novel climaxes with a wild confrontation between Jane and her chief enemy, and Ford plays clever variations throughout on the rivalry between Austen fans and fans of the Brontës. The best part of Jane Bites Back (aside from the concept)  is the comic byplay between Jane and her assistant Lucy, who’s hip, irreverent, and far too curious for her own good.
 
Jane Bites Back is a light vacation read whose weaknesses are outweighed by the fun of mixing up Austen, vampires, and publishing satire. Plus you get something more. To quote from “Shakespeare in Love,” there's “a bit with a dog,” which I defy any dog owner not to tear up at. And no, the dog is not a vampire, and though Jane herself does indeed draw blood, his fangs never come into play.

Books mentioned in this column:
Pride and Prejudice and Zomies: The Classic Regency Romance-Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem by Seth Graham-Smith (Quirk Classics, 2009)
Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford (Ballantine Books, 2009)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.