Fudge by Mortie

Fudge is a modern Pride and Prejudice that begins in a small town in Michigan. The names are altered, but kept close enough that it’s obvious which name belongs to which character (e.g., Elizabeth is Elise). Otherwise it’s a par-for-the-course retelling of P&P.

Why you should read this: You enjoy wry, self-deprecating narrators and extremely attractive Welshmen.

Why you may not like it: You didn’t order a side of raging bigotry with your wry, self-deprecating narrator and attractive Welshman.

Modern AU, PGish, Complete at DWG

Let’s start with the good. It’s told in the first person, which I’ve rarely seen work for Austen stories, but Mortie carries it off reasonably well. Elise’s voice is engaging. The details are good and the writing is perfectly adequate. Darcy — sorry, Davlin — is somewhat more recognizable than is usual. Elise’s euphemism-laden expletives are rather funny. The pacing is fine, some of the dialogue is good, and most of it is acceptable.

If this were all, it would just be another nice, forgettable modern American P&P. Instead, it’s unforgettable in all the wrong ways.

Moderns, as a genre, often come with a gimmick to spice up the same-old same-old of the Pride and Prejudice plot. There’s the one where they’re lawyers, there’s the one where they’re horticulturists, there’s the one where they’re dancers, there’s the one where Darcy is a critic, there’s the one where Elizabeth is an opera singer, there’s the one where she’s Asian-American and he’s not, there’s the one where he’s a concert pianist, there’s the one . . . you get the picture.

This is the one where Darcy has OCD. There are others, but this one puts the focus firmly on the disorder; it‘s the obstacle in their relationship, more than anything else.

Now, as I mentioned before, Davlin’s characterization is reasonably Darcyish. While he has good qualities, he’s arrogant, distant, chilly, and sometimes, even actively unpleasant. These are not symptoms; they’re personality flaws. Elise has every right to object to these things and ultimately call him on them. It’d be one thing if she overreacted to, say, a personal insult and framed everything afterwards through that, assumed these flaws were the entirety of his character, whatever. That is not what happens.

Elise, however annoyed she might be, is not so annoyed that she can’t immediately recognize his legitimate symptoms. Her reaction?

I wanted nothing more than to get out of there.

Yes: run away from the crazy man! The crazy man who has just committed the truly horrifying crime of cleaning his room. No, really. She’s creeped out by his cleanliness. However, she is a good employee and holds her ground in the face of such repulsive, appalling behaviour on the part of a resort guest.

Davlin himself is perfectly upfront.

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I have rather peculiar traits.”

“That’s an understatement.”

Lovely.

Ultimately, she objects less to his personal failings than to the fact that he has OCD. She describes him as a “freak” and a “weirdo” on numerous occasions (I count at least five on the first page alone) and, in case we hadn’t quite realized that this was the real problem with him, Elise makes it explicit during the Pemberley chapters:

I realized, to my chagrin, that I based most of my dislike on him because he behaved like such a weirdo, and now that he was almost normal there wasn’t much to dislike.

…That’s right. She doesn’t like him better because he’s trying to be more considerate, because he’s putting others at ease, because he no longer acts as if he’s the center of the world, but because he’s acting in a way that she interprets as “almost normal.” Her problem with him all along was that he had OCD. And her vitriolic rant at him about it is, apparently, what cures him!

There ‘s no indication that it led him to seek therapy, that he’s found medication that works for him, something like that. Oh, no. He just wasn’t trying hard enough to get over it, before. But love for a good woman, you know, conquers all.

You can see the shift from Elizabeth’s personal dislike to Elise’s bigotry in the transformation of Elizabeth’s original line:

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”

to:

“Yours seems to be to hate everything and everyone not hermetically sealed!”

In her defense, Elise does realize that it’s unfair to treat Davlin’s mental disorder as a personality flaw. She just … does it anyway? Oh, and when she hears about his quasi-engagement, she disbelieves it — because she can’t imagine that anybody could possibly tolerate his ‘peculiar habits.’  That’s right, people with mental disorders should just get over them, because nobody will tolerate them otherwise.

Elise does not merely restrict herself to ableism, however, when there are so many options available to her.

“My boss is fabulous,” Todd said over dinner. The use of that f-word, fabulous, made me question his sexuality.

Of course it did.

He [Collins] certainly had a high opinion of himself, the swine. By the end of the driveway he was huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf, though he was more like the Pathetic Wimpy Wolfcub. I may be pudgy but I wasn’t anywhere near so out of shape as he was. Cathy Van Burke must have a little golfcart for him.

I think she just hates everyone.

Finally, we got the Fudge version of the Wickham-Lydia affair. Wickham, a known rapist, burns down the resort and Lydia leaves with him. Elise’s chief concern is –?

That’s right, what people will think of her. Not Lydia. Elise is thinking of her reputation and her resort while her younger sister is hiding with a rapist.

In conclusion, Fudge is a decently-written, mildly quirky, occasionally amusing, constantly and comprehensively insulting story with a completely repellent main character. It’s difficult to be objective about something laced with this much bigotry, but averaging out the technical adequacy with the appalling content, I’ll give it a two.