AV Club #00: Emma (1815) & Clueless (1995)

or, "Failing to Read Jane Austen in Three Parts"

To date, I haven’t read a Jane Austen book cover to cover. Yes, that includes our feature today, Emma.

I enjoyed the books of the Western Canon that I read in school — there’s something pretty exciting and transcendent about a text that sticks around through generations — and I happily make room for them on my shelf as an adult. My giving up on this book was nothing personal; just a taste thing.

Regency era literature in particular is one of my blind spots. I haven’t read Dickens, I haven’t read Brontë. I’ve spent some time with Mary Shelley, but ultimately my reading habits are pretty domestic. I’m an All-American Girl, if I read something from around the 1800’s it’s more likely to be Poe or Thoreau.

Jane Austen is a legend though. Imagine being a household name centuries after your passing. For that alone I thought Austen deserved a chance to meet my fully-developed frontal lobe, even if it’s not really my genre. My taste swings more modern and angry but I can be sensitive too, I read Valley of the Dolls, I can queen out! And what better book to queen out to than the source text of one of my all-time favorite movies: Clueless (1995).

It was the perfect book-to-film adaptation to debut AV Club. How many sleepovers did I spend watching Clueless with my best friend in high school, cackling on my parents’ lumpen blue futon and sneaking shots from the liquor cabinet til the room spun? I can recite the story beat by beat. I would play some simple connect-the-dots with Emma and slide into the source text of my favorite chick flick seamlessly.

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Classic, timeless literature, but regrettably I dropped Emma about a quarter of the way into the book because I just didn’t like it.

The story is amusing in a discrete way — the humor and drama is there, but veiled behind pleasantries and subtext. Class tension bubbles beneath the surface, for Emma is a self-proclaimed matchmaker and there are countless social rules and taboos to be found and broken there. In spite of my taste for a messy protagonist, I struggled to click with Emma as a character. I could see her wheels turning, and she is funny, but my modern sensibilities wanted her to be 200% more annoying, more conniving, I could sense there was more beyond what I was seeing but I just didn’t care enough to dig into it.

Thing is, I don’t need an action-packed plot or high drama. I love a slice-of-life story; my favorite feature from Aaron Cometbus is Zimmerwald for chrissake. The man is a punk rock anthropologist and yet my favorite zine of his is the one about a guy sitting at a diner warming up to the cranky regulars and fry cooks. No plot necessary, just some people being in the same place at the same time. Their charm flickers beneath an unfriendly exterior and slowly reveals itself. I love the experience of watching them peel back their layers.

Being so far removed from the time and culture that produced a text can leave some of those layers lost in translation. I appreciated the matchmaker drama of it all but the spark just wasn’t there for me. Sure, maybe I could have achieved deeper understanding by looking into the background of this text and its historical context, but the veiled niceties of the noble English were keeping me from having any fun. I bet if I lived in the 1800’s I would’ve eaten it up, but the tea was lost on me so I gave up.

I need Emma to play “suck and blow” at a nobleman’s kegger with all the people she’s puppeteering, I’m begging…..

“Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

“No. But does it sound like I do?”

I still haven’t read a Jane Austen book cover to cover. I read that the miniseries adaptation of Emma from 2009 is pretty good and faithful to the source text so I let it roll while working on a project the other day. Emma’s character was fun — charming, bratty, good-natured — but I found myself wandering to do other things and eventually fully tuning it out, so it was a DNF just like the book.

trying to read Emma & giving up to re-watch Clueless for the 1000th time

I gave Emma a thorough chance and found it to be a snoozer, maybe I’ll try Pride & Prejudice some other time but I’m not rushing to it because, dear readers, life is too short to spend time and energy brunt forcing your way through a book you aren’t enjoying. Especially if it’s really long and you’re having a lousy week.

No book out there will resonate with every single reader. That’s normal. Try something unusual, it’s good for you, but don’t try to force a square peg into a round hole once you know it won’t fit.

Tell me about the classic literature you’ve given up on in the comments. Or, tell me about your favorite book-to-movie adaptations.

Next time we meet for AV club I’ll actually read a book all the way to the end. :)

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