I have been excited to read The Three Weissmanns of Westport since one of my thoughtful colleagues showed up at my classroom door waving The New York Times review of it. They loved it — not a feat often obtained, least of all by an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel!
In The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Sense and Sensibility goes modern New York. The novel opens with Betty, the matriarch, learning that her husband wants a divorce at the ripe old age of seventy-five. As she grieves the loss of her marriage (and as her ex-husband occupies their upper west side apartment with his much younger girlfriend), Betty flees to the coast with her two middle-aged daughters, Miranda and Annie, each in a life crisis of her own.
For Janeites, there is really no surprise what happens next. Betty and daughters move into a beachside cottage offered by Betty’s cousin. Miranda, reckless and emotional, falls in love with a deceptive man. Annie, quiet and reserved, tries to hold her mother and sister together while nursing her own heartbreak.
For the most part, the characterization rings true. Like Marianne, Miranda is amusingly self-absorbed:
“Miranda was engaged in a course of introspection that required not only her own attempt to examine her soul but an assumption, typical of her, that, therefore, everyone must of course be examining if not their own souls, then at least hers” (74).
Betty is ever-too-much like her daughter; Annie is repressed, Roberts (Austen’s Brandon) is shy and loyal. As far as the characters go, Schine has nailed it.
What she didn’t nail (at least for me) is the lightness, charm, and emotional weight of the original. The Three Weissmanns… struck me as more melancholy than funny or relateable. Perhaps modern readers can’t connect to any real sense of despondency in the Dashwoods — after all, who feels sorry that they have to move from an English manor house to an English countryside cottage? It hardly seems disastrous. Had I not known it would end well, though, I would have been truly distressed throughout my reading. Perhaps this melancholy is also produced by the fact that the Weissmanns are far older than the Dashwoods — all of them! The loneliness of two women in their fifties and their aging mother is simply not as fun as the loneliness and poverty of young women in their early twenties. 
It seems unfair, largely, to compare anything to Jane Austen, doesn’t it? Schine is brave indeed to take on something so beloved. To her credit, she adds a few of her own twists, particularly toward the end, and she truly adapts Austen’s stories to her own 21st-century purposes. The writing is excellent. Sense and Sensibility it is not, but The Three Weissmanns of Westport is a well-rendered read.
