Jane Austen in Scarsdale
Page 25
“I was Struck by the similarity of my in-laws’ retirement community to the closed world of the Jane Austen novel”
Anyway, Krantz’s memoir changed my life. More than midway through Sex and Shopping, the author announces that she began writing her first novel, Scruples, at the age of forty-seven. She tried writing short stories before that, she explains, and had some success writing nonfiction pieces for the women’s magazines (hers may have been the first article on “How To Satisfy Him in Bed”). But it turned out that novels, not stories or features, were her true genre, and it took her until the age of forty-seven to find this out.
I was forty-seven. A day or so after reading Krantz’s memoir, I was coming home from the mall where (in true Krantzian fashion) I had been shopping for the right shoes to go with a new top, when I had a revelation. I would call it a Joycean epiphany, only I wouldn’t put myself in such august literary company. Let me call it a Krantzian epiphany. I would write a novel.
I had been carrying around a cartload of ideas for years, filing them in my memory under the heading: “That would make a good novel.” Now I took them out and examined them. The most promising was one that derived from a visit to my in-laws in Boca Raton, Florida, a few years back. I was struck at the time by the similarity of their retirement community—a very sociable one inhabited by Jewish seniors—to the closed world of the Jane Austen novel. Here too was a plethora of gossip, visiting, meals, and romance (given the number of widows and widowers seeking new partners). Jane’s “three or four families in a country village” could easily be translated, I believed, into “four or five seniors in a Boca Raton Club.” And so Jane Austen in Boca was born. That day of the Krantzian epiphany I began to write it. Three months later, it was done. I found an agent (using a reference book from the local library), and she, bless her, placed the book with a wonderful editor at St. Martins Press. The dream of my childhood had been realized.
What have I learned from this experience that I can impart to other aspiring writers? Several things:
Don’t believe what they say constitutes the requisite behavior of the developing writer. Some writers, I’m sure, keep journals assiduously, write good short stories, and receive positive critiques from dissipated visiting writers at their colleges. But not doing/having these ; things is not a certain sign of incapacity.
“Just because you can’t do something at one point in your life doesn’t mean you can’t do it at another.”
Just because you can’t do something at one point in your life doesn’t mean you can’t do it at another. The elderly nasty writer at Bread Loaf had told me that if you’re not a writer by thirty, you’ll never be one. Don’t believe it. The dissipated visiting writer at my college told me I had a tin ear for dialogue. He happened to be right— I then. But I later learned to write dialogue, prob-i ably through watching movies. Ergo: it is possible to learn to do things that you couldnt do ! before.
Don’t try to write a great novel or even, dare I say i it, a good one. Simply try to write something ; that amuses or moves you. I take great pride in ? the Kirkus review of my first novel. It ends with the line: “A silly trifle—but clever and fun.” No Tolstoy or Eliot here, I readily admit, but so what? What’s wrong with a silly trifle, especially ; if it’s clever and fun?
About the Author
A ConverAation with Paula Marantz Cohen
What made you decide to adapt Persuasion?
Persuasion is a novel that is concerned with the issue of influence. When should people be influenced by those they love, and when should they trust their own judgment? Like Anne Elliot, the heroine in Austens novel, Anne Ehrlich is persuaded to give up the love of her life when she is very young. Is this a case of over-persuasion? She claims at the end that she is glad that things turned out as they did, but others might see things otherwise. I thought the theme of persuasion would relate well to the idea that many high school kids are persuaded by their parents to apply to certain schools or behave in certain ways that are not necessarily in keeping with their needs.
Why did you choose Westchester County as a setting for this novel?
Westchester—and particularly the Scarsdale area—has a reputation for being extremely competitive about college admissions. It’s the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. Still, my book could be set in any middle-class suburban community—and indeed, almost all communities have pockets of parents who are intensely ambitious for their children.
How did you draw from your own personal and professional experience—as a college professor and as a mother?
I have seen the pressures from both sides. As a professor, I hear kids express relief at being over the college crunch. I also can see how relatively unimportant the whole thing is once they arrive at school. Their education becomes a matter of what they make of it, not necessarily the school they go to. (Though obviously, there are many advantages to going to a high-profile college, I also know that there are advantages to going to a college that is less high profile and provides more attention and a more relaxed atmosphere.) As a mother, I’ve also been involved in worrying about whether my kids will get into a particular school. I find myself behaving at times like the parents in the book—which is why the book was a cautionary tale for me as well as for others. I should also note that I come from a family of high school teachers and so have access to that side of the story as well. Teachers often feel that their students are so focused on college that they miss the chance to truly learn and enjoy themselves in high school.
Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is the author of two previous novels, Jane Austen in Boca and Much Ado About JeAAie Kaplan, and four scholarly works of nonfiction, including Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth and The Daughter as Reader: Encounters Between Literature and Life. She lives in Moorestown, New Jersey, with her husband and two children.
Visit the author—s Web site at
www.paulamarantzcohen.com
Historical Perspective
Austen Characters are Much Like Us
by Paula Marantz Cohen
Lionel Trilling once wrote that Jane Austen possessed two sorts of admirers: those who read her for her keen insight into human nature and those who read her for a cozy image of old England. The recent film of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, clearly embraces the latter virtue. A great deal of time and money has been lavished on the details of English country life, down to the pigs in the Bennet yard and the hectic press of flesh at the local balls.
“Austen’s novels are not historical documents but novels of manners.”
Many reviewers will commend a Jane Austen adaptation if it looks authentic—which seems to translate into containing a lot of mud, having characters with bad teeth, and showing the plight of the servant class. But just because country balls in Regency England were headache-inducing affairs, does that mean that we have to experience them that way?
When there is too much scenery, costume, and décor to look at—however accurately and interestingly these things are portrayed—the singular human interaction inevitably recedes into the background. Austens novels are not historical documents but novels of manners. The visits, dinners, and balls are important insofar as they are conduits for relaying essential character. Only the fools and villains in Austen’s novels pay too much attention to surface detail.
It is my contention that Austen adaptations work best when they direct us to the present, not the past—when we are led to see how much the wayward Lydia Bennet resembles our flaky cousin, who ran off with the aspiring rock star and now lives with him in her parents’ basement. Or how the pragmatic Charlotte Lucas reminds us of our college roommate, who finally succumbed to the nerdy guy who had been chasing her since high school and now has a very nice family and a house in the suburbs. Needless to say, we reserve the role of the charming, discriminating, if not conventionally beautiful, Elizabeth Bennet for ourselves.
In this v
ein, Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary, both based on Austen fictions, strike me as inspired. They satirize societies very different from Austen’s, while capturing the spirit of the originals. The rites and rituals of an American suburban high school and of the single life in middle-class Britain are, ultimately, not so different from those of the English country gentry in Austen’s day. Or, rather, human nature, whether in a Beverly Hills high school or a London bedsit, isn’t very different.
With their meticulous research into the customs of the lesser gentry in provincial English towns at the turn of the nineteenth century, many recent adaptations are attached to an image of Jane Austen that is mired in the past. In their compulsion to re-create the minutiae of her age, they miss the forest for the trees. They forget that Austen endures because the people she depicted were just like us.
© 2006 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Recommended Reading from the desk of Anne Ehrlich
The Classics
PERSUASION by Jane Austen-of course!
HOWARD’S END, E. M. Forster
MIDDLEMARCH, George Eliot
PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Henry James
Contemporary Classics
HEARTBURN, Nora Ephron
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM, Rebecca Goldstein
INTUITION, Allegra Goodman
ON BEAUTY, Zadie Smith
Keep on Reading
Don’t miss these other delightful tales of Auburban life combined with classic literature from Paula Marantz Cohen:
“Utterly charming . . . think Pride and Prejudice, but with better weather.”
—Vanity Fair
“A brightly comic book...[that explores] the redemptive capacity of the literary imagination. . . . Highly literate light fiction.”
—Times Literary Supplement
Available in Paperback Wherever Books Are Sold
Reading Group Questions
1. Discuss whether the book is a realistic rendering of the college admissions process or a farcical exaggeration (this may well depend upon your own experiences with the process).
2. To what extent does the book achieve a balance between poking fun at the parents and treating them with understanding and sympathy?
3. How do you personally account for the kind of excesses that the book describes? Is it a matter of a particular community (an affluent suburb like Scarsdale) or of a larger social trend in parenting?
4. Do you understand why Anne gave up Ben at her grandmother’s urging when she was twenty-one? Does this seem realistic to you or does it make you think less of Anne?
5. What is your opinion of Winnie? Do you think she genuinely changes in the course of the novel?
6. Do you believe in the idea that there is one person who is right for us in life and that if we miss our chance to connect with that person, we lose something invaluable and irreplaceable?
7. The novel is loosely modeled on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Anne is overly persuaded to give up Ben when she was young. How does this theme of over-persuasion fit with the students she deals with in her capacity as guidance counselor? Discuss the degree to which the parents in the novel see their children as accessories: signs of status and upward mobility.
8. Discuss the degree to which the frenzy over college admission is a genuine expression of the love, concern, and fear that parents have about their children. Do you feel that parents are now more fearful than they used to be about their children’s future? If so, why?
9. If you have read Austen’s Persuasion, discuss the likenesses and similarities between its plot and the story of this novel. Why do you think the author chose to diverge where she did?
10. Some people have said that the book, while poking fun at the college admissions process, also supplies some helpful tips on what to do in guiding one’s child’s application process. Discuss some of these tips.
11. Where does helpful coaching end and immoral manipulation begin in helping students present the best possible profile to a college?
12. Do you believe that early admission and early action should be discontinued?
13. Discuss the sample college essays that are given in the book and say why they are amusing (if you find them so). How do you think Anne will handle the college admissions process when (or if) she has children of her own?