Look at Me!

When I researched romance novels as part of my recent reading project, Curtis Sittenfeld’s name kept coming up. I already knew a bit about her career, and these mentions made me think she played with romance as a lark, cheekily classing up the genre with her New Yorker-endorsed wit and craft. I read Prep a long time ago and loved it, but I hadn’t kept up with her work since. So I decided to see what the fuss was about.

I started with The Man of My Dreams and about halfway through, around the same time I realized the book was determined to be pointlessly unpleasant, I got a dim sense that I’d read it before. Not just read, in fact, but bought this book before, and hadn’t retained it because I knew I’d never want to read it again.¹ I kept waiting to like it—as I had hoped and expected to the previous time—but the heroine is a dreary bore (none of the characters are fun or interesting² ) and her life consists of passivity and anti-climax.³ I asked myself if, since I’d already read it once, I could be excused from continuing now. But I might have quit before the end during the first round—I really couldn’t recall—and since I’d bought it TWICE, I figured I should persevere.

On the night that I finished, I was having trouble sleeping and couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I googled Sittenfeld on my phone while in bed and I came across her mention of a review that got her into “hot water.” As someone who has been in the same situation, I was both excited and intrigued, and I looked up the review anticipating that I’d be on her side. But what I found was a shocking attack on Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot.

Weeks later, this coincidence⁴ continues to impress me because while I was reading The Man of My Dreams, I frequently thought of Melissa Bank, who sadly wrote only two books before her death last year. When my mind turned to her, it turned with longing because her novels, while similar to The Man of My Dreams, are much better. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is poignant and funny, finely observed and wise.⁵  The Wonder Spot is probably inferior to Girls’ Guide but still moving and thoughtful.⁶ I actually urged everyone to read it in my Instagram stories in 2020⁷ because I knew that even if my friends had heard of the book, the awful cover and not-great title probably kept them from investigating it.

Sittenfeld’s review wasn’t just disconcerting in its meanness, though it does feel mean in an uncomfortably personal way. It starts with the invocation of calling another woman a “slut” and makes a lot of weird comments about what fiction should or shouldn’t do⁸ , which has the effect of implying that Bank is an hopelessly amateurish, undereducated writer rather than someone talented who fell short on this particular occasion.⁹

But big deal, a lot of reviews are mean.¹⁰ I was more scandalized by the fact that much of what Sittenfeld says of The Wonder Spot could be said of The Man of My Dreams, and in fact I did say it (think it) while I was reading it:

• “essentially a story collection.” I’d have bet my precious personal dollars that as many as four chapters from The Man of My Dreams were published as stand alone stories; it was a little annoying and distracting while reading, but also didn’t feel like a totally fair objection. Why shouldn’t a book be a collection of stories? I can’t remember if I felt The Wonder Spot was similarly choppy.¹¹

• The Wonder Spot’s main character is “much like the one in Bank’s earlier book.” The three Sittenfeld romances I read (The Man of my Dreams, Eligible, and Romantic Comedy, see footnote for reactions¹² ) have heroines far too similar for my liking given that I didn’t like them at all. They’re vaguely combative, sour women with oppressive, appearance-based insecurity who are nasty to men who are nice to them.¹³ Two of those three also, for years, pine over men who don’t love them.

• The Wonder Spot’s “relentless quips” are “problematic”: “their ubiquity indicates that Bank finds Sophie to be as much of a stitch as Sophie finds herself.” In Romantic Comedy, Sittenfeld’s main character is a longtime writer for a “Saturday Night Live” proxy, and there are frequent scenes in which that character gets laughs from audiences small and large, or in which another character praises her for her humor. Is that the act of someone who doesn’t have a high opinion of her quip capacity? In all three aforementioned books, Sittenfeld is occasionally funny and sometimes amusing. But Romantic Comedy didn’t make me laugh once. Too many quips is a (highly subjective) editorial complaint rather than a writerly one, anyway, in my humble opinion.¹⁴

Sittenfeld set herself a big challenge with the premise of Romantic Comedy and I don’t mean to diminish that. Nor am I suggesting that SNL is such a sterling laugh riot, you better write nonstop unadulterated knee-slappers if you’re going to use its legacy. I just hope you’re seeing what I was seeing, which is that in the Melissa Bank review, Sittenfeld is shadowboxing. As the perpetually prickly Jennifer Weiner put it at the time, the review isn’t concerned with the merits of The Wonder Spot, but rather “Sittenfeld’s anxiety about how her own work has been perceived.” And anxiety about how her work will be received, since the review is from 2005, a year before The Man of My Dreams came out. (Sittenfeld said in interviews that she wrote The Man of My Dreams while writing Prep, and she entered a new, two-book deal shortly after Prep became a bestseller in early 2005, so the Man of My Dreams manuscript was probably already with her publisher.¹⁵ )

Sittenfeld’s review of The Wonder Spot has stayed with me because it’s a stark example of how flagrantly writers self-incriminate. Like everyone, we broadcast ourselves to the world around us with our every waking moment: shopping at CVS, driving a car, arguing with an automated answering system.¹⁶ But unlike everyone else, writers put many of those broadcasts into print, ensuring that strangers far and wide can compile and examine them. (We also sometimes believe our linguistic ability means we can shield ourselves in impenetrable camouflage—a hubristic, Greek tragedy-level misapprehension—that then spurs us to produce even more exhibits against ourselves.)

Every writer makes choices about what to say and how to say it, and those choices are a sort of fingerprint. We can’t not tell on ourselves because every piece of writing, no matter how poorly written or fantastical, is evidence of what is or was once in our minds. The more we write, the more we confess in the public space. We just hope that our colleagues and peers have the good manners to not call out our glaring personal issues in too cruel a manner.

I’d argue that most of us go through life yearning for grace from others when it comes to our automatic, unconscious us-isms, and we usually get it. The social pact rests on some degree of tact and there are consequences when it’s violated. I once precipitated a fight that almost forced a red eye flight from SFO to emergency land because I intuited that the terrible drunk man behind me was dealing with pants-shitting anxiety over what was probably his first flight, and mocked him for it. I wouldn’t exactly say it was my fault because that guy was much too wasted and a complete asshole who was causing problems first. But it would have gone differently if I’d not let him know that I saw the festering wound of his fear. If you’re going to pull the pin, you better have space to throw the grenade.

It’s really hard to get that space when you’re on a plane and when you’re a writer, and it’s one of the hard things about being a reviewer, in my experience. You want to tell people when a book isn’t great—it’s excruciating to watch people pretend a book is great when it’s not even good, and you know they know it’s not good, but they’re pretending otherwise because of politics, which happens a lot! But detailing the problems with someone else’s work is like spam texting an invite to everyone with an internet connection, asking them to explain the problems with your own. And sometimes, as I suppose this post proves, they’ll take you up on it.

Next week: Deerskin, Tender Morsels, and rape in fairy tales.

1  I’m curious to revisit Prep, which I kept in my collection, but I’m terrified that it’s also bad, which will definitively reveal that Past Me was a big chowderhead.

2  I don’t think characters need to be “likable,” fun, or funny, but it is a nice consolation when everything else is going wrong.

3  I’m certain there are books I’ve loved or at least liked before that also fit this description, though I can’t think of any at the moment. (Let me know if you do.)

4  Except there ARE no coincidences! As we shall soon see.

5  Some random lines I underlined whenever I first read it: “It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.” “I was seeing myself in the mirrors of my adolescence, where I’d discovered that I’d never be a beautiful woman.”

6  An underlined sample: Up until that moment, I’d been at the earliest stages of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he’d keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.

7  I read it for the first time that summer because my earliest pandemic activities had involved rereading The Girls’ Guide and when I did, I thought, damn, that’s good, I should find this woman’s other stuff.

8  I found the decrees debatable but I didn’t graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Sittenfeld did. Once, in a review I wrote, an editor inserted a line about what fiction/novels/books “should” do that I didn’t agree with, either. But I was barely being paid and I was so sick of edits that I didn’t push back. (Additionally, I was relatively new to freelancing; my relationship with being edited is very different now.) I regret so much that the line was allowed to stay in. It truly haunts me, and I hope it’s lost to the abyss of the internet ASAP.

9  Sittenfeld complains that a reader is “not one iota smarter after finishing it”—as if people are one iota smarter after anything we regularly do, especially when it comes consumption [sorry!] of cultural artifacts. (We are not.)

10  Reviewers were not kind to Sittenfeld the following year. Janet Maslin took a blowtorch to The Man of My Dreams in The New York Times, and New York Magazine hated it. A decade later later, upon the release of Eligible, Ursula K. Le Guin demolished her in 600 words; Sittenfeld tweeted about it the day after Le Guin died.

11  Janet Maslin responded to this commonality, and also elected Bank the superior: “The Man of My Dreams, like the similarly quotidian but more varied and assured oeuvre of Melissa Bank, is set up as a string of lonely-hearted short stories rather than a fully imagined novel.” For both books, it seems only one chapter was previously published but that may not be for lack of trying.

12  I LOVED Darcy’s confession in Eligible (a retelling of Pride and Prejudice) but it’s Darcy’s first freaking love pronouncement, of course it’s going to hit. There was also a group game-playing scene that made me laugh out loud. But the ending is dreadful and on the whole the book never quite clicks into place. There’s something brittle about it. Romantic Comedy, I hated a whole lot. Irredeemable, I’m afraid. The Man of My Dreams, I disliked very much but didn’t feel wronged by until I read Eligible and Romantic Comedy. Now, with the weight of those other titles resting upon me, I’m irrationally angry about how little I enjoyed it.

13  Yes, I fit this description. It’s valid to not want to read about oneself.

14  People should get a kick out of themselves. Who else is going to do it for you if you can’t do it for yourself?

15  This is my citation for the timing of the two book deal, and you should read it because it’s proof she can be very charming! Look how cute she is: “I'd look at a particular section of the manuscript and think, Can this be cut? Is this truly essential? And then I'd think, Of course it's not essential! It's a novel! The whole thing can be cut!”

16  Do you remember the moment you realized people were transparent? I was in my later teens, looking at younger, posturing teens and pitying them for their palpable self-consciousness, which they highlighted to in their attempt to cover up. It was a formative moment, to experience the insight that I had been like that at their age; it was horrifying to think I’d been that easy to see through. It wasn’t until I got much older that I learned it’s not the domain of the young, that’s just how it is for as long as you’re alive. Forgetting this is one of the fundamental necessities for bearing life itself.