Bitten by the Austen Bug

by

Lev Raphael

Last year I noted on Bibliobuffet that the craze for all things Austen was still going strong when I reviewed Michael Thomas Ford’s delightful comic fantasy Jane Bites Back. That novel features Austen as a cranky vampire who manages a bookstore where the sale of Austen stuff drives her to distraction. She, alas, wants the royalties but she also wants to publish again. Apparently the longing for immortality isn’t quenched by immortality.

I mentioned Austen mash-ups in passing in that review, but though I’d followed the phenomenon, it wasn’t on my front burner. It’s not that I had anything against, say, zombie novels—one of my favorite novels of the last ten years is Charlie Huston’s terrific Already Dead where a vampire PI hunts zombies in Manhattan, which is divided up by vampire clans who try to keep a low profile. Rampaging dumb zombies tend to be bad PR. I liked that book so much I read it twice and have used it when teaching writing workshops because it’s a masterpiece of voice and setting.

I also didn’t have any objections to authors “messing with” Austen. The books stand by themselves, inspiring readers and writers alike, and there are dozens of “sequels” to Pride and Prejudice alone. It’s not as if Austen’s work—or anyone’s—can be objectively spoiled by another author.

I myself had rewritten The House of Mirth from the perspective of one of its minor characters, so I had no feelings about any classic text being sacred. I now see that spending two years reading about The Gilded Age and crafting my book with a period voice actually laid some groundwork for approaching Austen’s Regency world in my own way.

Reading Ford’s book and reading more about Austen made me finally turn to the mother of all mash-ups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I downloaded a sample and found it surprisingly clever, even though Graham-Smith isn’t as gifted a writer as Charlie Huston, or as compelling. When I read the whole book, I found that the novelty and fun reached a point of diminishing returns before the half-way mark. Zombie mayhem in Regency England gets old very fast because it keeps repeating itself in attacks, chomping, gore, and heroic defenses by the amazingly athletic and fierce Bennet girls. I suppose you could complain about concept fatigue with the film Twenty-eight Days Later, too, set in today’s England, but that moves much faster—as do its zombies.

I’ve always told my writing students that you can learn as much, sometimes more, from a book that doesn’t work for you as from one you admire or even love, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies got me thinking. I didn’t enjoy the shtick of zombies thrust into Austen’s world for long, and his method of superimposing a zombie universe on the Bennet’s made me think of a very different path. What if you approached a mash-up from the opposite direction? What if you insinuated yourself into one of Austen’s texts and wrote outwards, as it were, in the same way that plastic surgeons now redesign women’s faces from inside?

A character who almost steals Pride and Prejudice is the fretful, bossy, complaining Mrs. Bennet. I suppose if my last name were Manfredini, I would have made her an Italian Mamma, but I’m Jewish, and thinking about her and her brood, the first line of my mash-up seemed obvious: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, not least by a Jewish mother, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

The door had opened for me, and I reread the book for the fourth or fifth time, speculating as to how exactly the Bennets might be Jewish and what that would mean, what their antecedents were, how all of that could affect the entail of the Bennet estate and Lizzie’s love life. I was off and running, and working my changes into Austen’s text made me fall in love with her wit and wisdom all over again. I especially marveled at her caustic genius in pinning characters like Lady Catherine de Bourgh to the wall. It was a great deal of fun to make that aristocrat even more unpleasant by adding anti-Semitism to her arsenal of contempt; ditto “revising” the smarmy Mr. Collins whose new past I won’t reveal here.

Every “adjustment” of Austen’s book brought me deeper into Regency manners, mores, and history as I did secondary reading, especially about Anglo-Jews. Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile isn’t a book I ever expected to write, but in my three decades of life as a published author, I’ve learned to never turn away when a book pokes my shoulder and says “Write me!”

Books mentioned in this column:
Already Dead by Charlie Huston (Del Rey Books, 2005)
Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford (Ballantine Books, 2009)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Graham-Smith (Quirk Classics, 2009)
Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile (Amazon Digital Services, 2011)

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-six years along with a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of twenty-one 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 latest book Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile is his second e-book original. 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.