Hateship Courtship Loveship

On "Romantic Comedy," a new novel by Curtis Sittenfeld:

Early in life, Curtis Sittenfeld began keeping journals; she realized she had thoughts worth recording, and then eventually she discovered she could build a career on these thoughts.

Like her hero, Alice Munro, Sittenfeld sees an iceberg "under the surface." For example, many of us might choose to overlook the implications of a quick text exchange. But Sittenfeld makes the exchange into a kind of symphony. He sent me a dick pic, and I hadn't asked for one. I started to compose a reply, but he resumed writing, even though he must have seen my thought bubble....I deleted my sentence and just wrote, "WOW!" Then....I wrote....."For me? Flattering!!"

In her newest novel, Sittenfeld invents a protagonist who writes for "Saturday Night Live." One strength in the book is the fictional sketches Sittenfeld creates. "I noticed that, on The Voice, the female judge would offer a reasonable opinion, and the male judges would shout at her for talking too much....And the male shouting actually went on much, much longer than anything the female judge had to say...." "I noticed that Pete Davidson was dating women who were much, much more powerful and successful than he would ever be....And the same seemed to be true for Colin Jost...." "I noticed that people liked to make fun of the Indigo Girls. The band had just become a kind of punch line for lazy jokes--although, clearly, these women are ambitious, incisive, resilient, and dedicated to their art...."

It's a shame that Sittenfeld's novel loses steam in its Second and Third Acts, but even then, I like the questions she raises. How do you poop in the home of your one-night stand? What are the exact rules for constructing a COVID quarantine "pod"? What does it mean when George Floyd dies--and, a few weeks later, a young white woman is photographed in a shopping mall, wearing a tee shirt that says, "Good Vibes Only"--?

I'll follow Sittenfeld wherever she goes. I'm giving the new book a B or B-plus.

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