Yenta Sensibility

JANE AUSTEN IN BOCA IS A COMEDY OF KVELLING

In her first novel. Paula Marantz Cohen takes Jane Austen's worldview— "three or four families in a country village"—and transplants it to a location less given to carriages and vicars than to Sansabelt slacks and gastroenterologists: Boca Raton, Florida. Jane Austen in Boca is the utterly charming and surprisingly shtick-free account of three older women at a mostly Jewish retirement community—the sweet May Newman, the pragmatic Lila Katz, and the acerbic intellectual Flo Kliman—and their efforts to make good marriages; think Pride and Prejudice, but with better weather. Cohen, who is a distinguished professor of English at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and whose in-laws live in Boca, is blessed with an ear for dialogue ("Has your daughter-in-law left? I sense a power outage") and does well to train her gimlet eye on anthropological rites (e.g., how Jewish women love to reduce six degrees of separation to one degree by always figuring out someone whom their interlocutor went to summer camp with). Can St. Martin's Press, the publishing house that turned the localized and niche-specific The Nanny Diaries into a national success, do it again with a property whose appeal to people named Roberts screams "Doris" but not "Julia"? Let the kvelling begin.

HENRY ALFORD

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