It's not that Jane Austen holds the patent to certain kinds of novelistic first lines; it's just that any sentence resembling the opener to Pride and Prejudice—which ranks somewhere between "I sing of arms and the man" and "In the beginning was the Word" in its iconic immortality—must automatically imply an influence and a debt. That in mind, here's the smilingly ironic Austen-evoker that begins Elinor Lipman's brisk and playful new book, My Latest Grievance: "I was raised in a brick dormitory at Dewing College, formerly the Mary-Ruth Dewing Academy, a finishing school best known for turning out attractive secretaries who married up."
Lipman has been evoking Austen for eight novels now, and she knows what she's doing. The books, such as the frankly titled The Way Men Act, are usually narrated by a New England bachelorette who mediates some kind of romantic imbroglio and then gets caught up in one herself. You may shudder at this description and reflexively lump Lipman's books with Cosmo-born crap like The Nanny Wears Prada, but I would plead with you putative Darcy's and Elizabeth Bennets to withhold your judgment. In fact, Lipman's heroines are consummately intelligent and interesting: In the battle of the sexes, they're more like principled generals than the vacuous cannon fodder who go charging through the bedrooms of most romance fiction. Plus, Lipman knows how to layer her subplots to create a well-balanced and climactic tale. Best of all, she's got a gift for dialogue far surpassing many of our modish but tin-eared lit legends.
My Latest Grievance is slightly different fare, as it's narrated by 16-year-old Frederica, who grows up on the campus of third-rate Dewing College because her parents are dormitory houseparents. They're also professors, annoyingly active union reps (hence all the grievances), and sermonizing liberals—"two bleeding hearts that beat as one." Because of her celebrity status on campus and the town hall democracy of her upbringing, Frederica is gregarious, opinionated and of "the firm conviction that everything was [her] concern." Her appetite for nosiness is thus substantially whetted when Laura Lee French becomes housemother of the dorm across the quad, since Laura Lee happens to have been her father's first wife. Moreover, Frederica's father, it is divulged, cheated on Laura Lee with the woman who became Frederica's mother, throwing a crimp in that couple's droning sanctimony. To add to the awkwardness, the idiosyncratic Laura Lee goes about befriending Frederica and then starts a highly public affair with the university president.
Obviously, there's some pretty extravagant stagecrafting here, but Lipman rigs it up well, relying on that timely gift for dialogue: Nearly the whole novel exists inside the snow globe of quotation marks. Frederica's mother and father, sociology and psychology professors respectively, are pricelessly characterized by their endless analysis and PC patter. When Frederica accuses them of complicity in Laura Lee's affair because of the leverage it gives the faculty union, her father responds with all earnest concern, "Did you mean that any benefits that accrue to the union do not make you happy?" The language is sharp throughout, and except for a few lazy lapses, like calling an adulterer a "Ten Commandments scofflaw," it doesn't revert to the perky piffle that flows so copiously from the pens of chick-lit ghostwriters.
Midway through, the novel takes a turn when the distraught president's wife tries to kill herself through carbon-monoxide poisoning. This is the critical crux that is present in most humorous novels, after which the story can go one of two ways. It can deepen and acquire a situational seriousness, wherein what was light becomes fraught with consequence. A good example is Sense and Sensibility, where the turning point is Marianne's realization that Willoughby has been leading her on. At the start, the slightly prissy Elinor and the emotional Marianne had been played as ironic foils to one another; but from this point on the meaning of their clashing temperaments is intensified by the themes of sisterly loyalty and the management of heartbreak.
That's one way. The second way is to go quirky, and, unfortunately, this more closely categorizes the end of My Latest Grievance. Good themes are present—the true natures of childishness and maturity, responsibility for the private tragedies of others, even just the effects of adultery—but they are merely glossed in the somewhat madcapped finale that occurs during the great New England Blizzard of '78. A few scenes with the now brain-damaged president's wife are well-intentioned but miscarried and are a little embarrassing. Most of all, it is deflating when an entertaining and plot-entangled character like Laura Lee is explained away as "professionally speaking, nuts."
It's the seriousness, then, of Jane Austen that's hardest to replicate. Lipman does wonderfully with the penetrating and pithy comic side of things. But, in this book at least, she can't quite give up the splashy frolic to venture out into deeper waters.
A brief postscript: While writing this I've been thinking about my favorite opening lines. So I'd like to invite readers to help me compile the best all-time first lines, from books, speeches, movies, music, anything. E-mail your favorites to [email protected].