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Redeeming Eve
Thirty-year old Eve Sterling is a ’90s woman with a hankering for the 18th century. A literature scholar writing her thesis on Jane Austen, Eve lives alone in Manhattan, is eclipsed by her domineering mother, Maxie, and doubts she’ll ever find a man to rival her beloved fictional heroes. When a friend sets her up with Hart—a funny, gentle photographer—Eve simultaneously discovers true love and loses control over her own fate. Eve aims to achieve a choreographed, graceful existence, one modeled on the elegant world portrayed in Austen’s novels. But, in a series of both comic and painful mishaps, she learns just how clumsy and chaotic real life can be. Irrevocably changed by marriage and motherhood, Eve struggles to reconcile contrasting those to herself versus those to her family. And, if carving out a niche for herself while balancing the demands of a new baby isn’t enough, Eve has the additional burden of living in the shadow of an imposing celebrity—her mother! Suddenly thrust into the limelight, Maxie has been transformed into a media darling just as her own daughter’s career begins to falter. Embarking on a journey to reclaim her lost sense of purpose, Eve is forced to face the toughest question of can she fulfill herself without severing the bonds to those she loves most? By turns witty and poignant, Redeeming Eve is an accomplished, engaging first novel. Anyone who has ever risked old dreams for a richer, more complex life—or ever longed to do so—will identify with its very contemporary heroine.
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First published July 1, 2000
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January 30, 2021A curious reading experience. I learned of "Redeeming Eve" in the course of reading something about or by the author, who has a new book coming out. It was Austen-adjacent and I had never heard of it; the library had a copy, so there I was. I read it over the course of 24 hours, and though I spent a lot of time writing about it in my notebook this morning when I should have been moving my own novel's characters further along through their adventures, now that I sit down to write a review I am not sure what to say. I feel further the pressure to say something sensible, because not many people have reviewed this on Goodreads and my words will carry an undeserved weight should anyone, having read Ms. Bokat's new book, feel curious about her backlist and come looking here.
I'm always interested in how writers approach Austen; not usually so much the continuations and variations, of which there is a large and growing number, but more the novels that seek to explore the hold that she continues to exert on our modern collective imagination. Sometimes I like modern retellings: Unmarriagable or The Three Weissmans of Westport, for example. But often they are too sweet for my liking, or use Austen simply as a sort of branding tool for a romance that bears only the most superficial resemblance to any of her works.
"Redeeming Eve" is not sickly sweet, it is not a direct retelling of any Austen tale, and it does not focus on the love story to the expense of all else. The titular Eve is embedded in a family, in friends, in a life, and inciting action of the story comes at a point after one of Austen's would have ended: when Eve, in a happy but relatively new relationship, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and gets married.
Her new husband is kind, considerate and handsome but not rich; his family is crass and unsympathetic while hers is wealthier, more educated and somewhat overpowering, especially Eve's mother. Eve struggles to finish her dissertation on Austen, addled by new motherhood and a sudden move to the suburbs. She is disconnected from her longtime friends; her mother, a charismatic infertility counselor, has suddenly become a small-time celebrity, with a confessional talk show in the Oprah/Jerry Springer mode. Things come to a head when her dissertation goes off the rails, the young parents face money problems and her mother uses Eve's life as fodder on her talk show. The debt to Austen becomes clear in the way that self-knowledge is the real mainspring of the plot, the engine that drives it to its tidy conclusion.
This book, published in 2000, is set in the mid to late 90s. Those are the years of my early adulthood and I remember them clearly, or imagine I do; but what struck me chiefly reading this book was how distant it felt, how long ago and innocent this world before cellphones and the internet and 9/11 and all that followed in the new century. It did not feel innocent at the time, of course; it felt complex and gritty and real and full of problems.
And it is not simply the lack of cellphones and internet but something about the writing itself that felt curiously old-fashioned, and I am struggling to describe why. I was trying to write fiction in those years too, though not with much result, and the sort of thing I was trying to write was very much like this. By which I mean, a sort of indirect presentation of emotions, an unobtrusive narrator persona who does not judge or draw conclusions, instead presenting people and situations in a wryly detached, cinema verite manner -- the sort of thing Ann Beattie was doing to so much acclaim in those years and earlier.
I am perplexed as to why exactly it feels dated to me now: isn't Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends, to cite one famous recent example, very much the same kind of thing, but with computers and cellphones? Yet somehow it does feel dated: cushioned in privilege, that pre-9/11 cocoon of insouciant concern with trivia that -- only in retrospect -- feels so characteristic of the 1990s, for comfortably situated people like this writer and her characters (and myself, I am not leaving me out of it) who had the luxury to consider the larger world and its insistent problems as merely the subject of curiosity --
And is that not also Austen? Isn't that what people who don't like Austen always complain about, that she wrote of wealthy privileged women hunting for husbands?
Perhaps I am not being fair to this book. But I am only trying to understand. Every novel is in some way a snapshot of the time it was written, and like a snapshot capturing background details that are mundane at the time and may strike later viewers as startling, incongruous or even objectionable.
A friend recently described rereading a Harry Potter book, the entire series of which she had already read through three times with her three children, and being struck only now by all the fat-shaming; that is probably a better example of changing times and sensibilities than anything I could pick out of "Redeeming Eve."
I'm always interested in how writers approach Austen; not usually so much the continuations and variations, of which there is a large and growing number, but more the novels that seek to explore the hold that she continues to exert on our modern collective imagination. Sometimes I like modern retellings: Unmarriagable or The Three Weissmans of Westport, for example. But often they are too sweet for my liking, or use Austen simply as a sort of branding tool for a romance that bears only the most superficial resemblance to any of her works.
"Redeeming Eve" is not sickly sweet, it is not a direct retelling of any Austen tale, and it does not focus on the love story to the expense of all else. The titular Eve is embedded in a family, in friends, in a life, and inciting action of the story comes at a point after one of Austen's would have ended: when Eve, in a happy but relatively new relationship, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and gets married.
Her new husband is kind, considerate and handsome but not rich; his family is crass and unsympathetic while hers is wealthier, more educated and somewhat overpowering, especially Eve's mother. Eve struggles to finish her dissertation on Austen, addled by new motherhood and a sudden move to the suburbs. She is disconnected from her longtime friends; her mother, a charismatic infertility counselor, has suddenly become a small-time celebrity, with a confessional talk show in the Oprah/Jerry Springer mode. Things come to a head when her dissertation goes off the rails, the young parents face money problems and her mother uses Eve's life as fodder on her talk show. The debt to Austen becomes clear in the way that self-knowledge is the real mainspring of the plot, the engine that drives it to its tidy conclusion.
This book, published in 2000, is set in the mid to late 90s. Those are the years of my early adulthood and I remember them clearly, or imagine I do; but what struck me chiefly reading this book was how distant it felt, how long ago and innocent this world before cellphones and the internet and 9/11 and all that followed in the new century. It did not feel innocent at the time, of course; it felt complex and gritty and real and full of problems.
And it is not simply the lack of cellphones and internet but something about the writing itself that felt curiously old-fashioned, and I am struggling to describe why. I was trying to write fiction in those years too, though not with much result, and the sort of thing I was trying to write was very much like this. By which I mean, a sort of indirect presentation of emotions, an unobtrusive narrator persona who does not judge or draw conclusions, instead presenting people and situations in a wryly detached, cinema verite manner -- the sort of thing Ann Beattie was doing to so much acclaim in those years and earlier.
I am perplexed as to why exactly it feels dated to me now: isn't Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends, to cite one famous recent example, very much the same kind of thing, but with computers and cellphones? Yet somehow it does feel dated: cushioned in privilege, that pre-9/11 cocoon of insouciant concern with trivia that -- only in retrospect -- feels so characteristic of the 1990s, for comfortably situated people like this writer and her characters (and myself, I am not leaving me out of it) who had the luxury to consider the larger world and its insistent problems as merely the subject of curiosity --
And is that not also Austen? Isn't that what people who don't like Austen always complain about, that she wrote of wealthy privileged women hunting for husbands?
Perhaps I am not being fair to this book. But I am only trying to understand. Every novel is in some way a snapshot of the time it was written, and like a snapshot capturing background details that are mundane at the time and may strike later viewers as startling, incongruous or even objectionable.
A friend recently described rereading a Harry Potter book, the entire series of which she had already read through three times with her three children, and being struck only now by all the fat-shaming; that is probably a better example of changing times and sensibilities than anything I could pick out of "Redeeming Eve."
October 24, 2013
An interesting piece of chic-li (not my preferred genre), with more to recommend it than most of a similar style/theme. I just kept wishing she’d had a slightly better editor.
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