Persuasion, by Jane Austen
Oh, you know, it's Austen.
I enjoyed this -- I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice more, not sure if that's controversial or un-so. Austen is phenomenal at what she does, and there's nothing useful I can add here that isn't already baked in, so I won't. (I was about to say "unless you're a MAN who thinks Austen isn't for YOU", but then.... I also read modern romance novels for fun, I'm not really the arbiter of what men in general would enjoy or might be irrationally avoiding?)
I read this book because my friend Henry wrote a tweet-and-article about the new film adaptation, with the thesis:
tl;dr Persuasion is about people who have too much faith in themselves and their own self-direction. This adaptation mocks our current versions of that, under the guise of shitposting.... It's esp egregious when they say "a 5 here is a 10 in Bath" --- but there's a useful comparison between Austen and us. She would be scathing of our morals as she was of her contemporaries'. This adaptation is, very crudely, trying to show that.... Most of what we love about adaptations are the dresses and nice shots of stately homes. Austen would be unimpressed with that... Jane Austen disapproved of you and I suspect this production, maybe without quite realising, does too. It is mocking our culture in the way Austen mocked hers.
My other cross-reference is that Austen is namedropped in MacIntyre's After Virtue as (if I remember rightly) an example of a modern-ish virtue-ish ethicist.
My main thought after reading this was that I'd like to do a parody (or perhaps not parody? an earnest modern homage, in-the-style-of), set in silicon valley. [I will probably never do this because coming up with fun book ideas is much more fun than writing the whole book]. I don't know why this appeals to me so much, or why it feels fitting -- are the two sets really so analogous? Or is it just that silicon valley is where the New Money is, and Persuasion is about waning aristocrats and rising arrivistes (in their case, interestingly, Navy Men).
Anyway, my first thought was that she's a WASP and he's a tech bro, her family disapproves of him but eventually finds out he's quite sweet (and also now he's worth millions, whereas before he was broke, and the family is running out of money). But I think it's actually much funnier if I make it a non-romance novel about founders and investors -- the heroine is working at a startup which raised a lot of money but has no revenue and is spending beyond its means, keeping up appearances. She's the only competent person at the company, where the C-suite (filling in for the Austen parents and siblings) are vain and hysterical. It seems like nobody ever notices her -- sensible sensible Jane -- but she charms a guy who turns out to be fabulously wealthy and who ultimately invests in her idea for a startup of her own (while bailing out the startup she works for -- I hate this personally but Austen seems to be into it). Some other guy briefly pretends he's going to invest but it turns out he's a charlatan or stiffed some other startup or whatever, I don't -- Jane finds this out because she befriends a barista at her local coffeeshop, who nobody else at her startup ever deigns to talk to but who turns out to be a savvy former founder who has fallen on hard times. If you want to invest in this novel, hit me up!