Briefly Noted

Eligible, by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House). In this contemporary version of “Pride and Prejudice,” Liz Bennet, a journalist, and her older sister, Jane, a yoga instructor, travel from New York back to their family, in Ohio, where they meet a neurosurgeon named Fitzwilliam Darcy and his friend Chip Bingley, a star on a reality television show resembling “The Bachelor.” At times closely following the Austen template, at times departing from it, the book mixes details that evoke Austen with ones that are studiously modern. The fun lies in Sittenfeld’s acute sensitivity to social negotiations and conventions, as when she dissects the women’s “elaborate fitness rituals and fakely scented lotions and the hours—nay, years—they devoted to making some man see them in a particular way.”