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The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld review – sharp stories about the pleasure and pain of nostalgia
Curtis Sittenfeld is irresistibly drawn to the awkward: to the geeks, and to those who are not quite as attractive, confident, rich or successful as the peers with whom, often to everyone's surprise, they find themselves sharing space and time. Her readers, one suspects, feel a strong pull of identification with these less accomplished and veneered characters, not least because Sittenfeld allows us to believe there are significant compensations on this side of the social balance sheet. She took that optimistic outlook to its limits in her last novel, Romantic Comedy, in which a dating-averse backroom TV writer finds love with a front-page celebrity. Sittenfeld might also have titled this collection of a dozen short stories The Hare and the Tortoise, although it is not always entirely clear that slow and steady does win the race. Many of her protagonists, who are often also narrating their own stories, find themselves in middle age, in domestic and familial circumstances of varying contentedness and stability; and whatever their feelings towards husband, wife, children or job, they are inclined towards looking back, perhaps to stave off the less certain prospect of looking forward. Their encounters with the past are not always purely confined to memory; quite often they involve the unexpected resurfacing of former friends and intimates. The key message here is that whatever you think was going on, however sure you were of another's thoughts and feelings about your shared history, you will almost certainly be wrong in some crucial detail. In The Tomorrow Box, an English teacher thoroughly embedded in a happy personal and professional life is surprised by an invitation to meet up with Michael, a guy who was part of his circle – the self-styled 'Octagon' group of friends – just after they graduated. Michael, nicknamed Anus behind his back, has subsequently become extremely well known and extremely rich by reinventing himself as a self-help guru and pioneer of TotalHonesty. Their rendezvous is the epitome of the kind of frictionless largesse that a certain kind of American wealth brings: a concierge glides our school teacher, Andy, into his armchair, drinks appear silently, an assistant chaperones the influencer into his old friend's presence. Through their bland reminiscences and speed updating, Michael manages to give vent to the class insecurity he felt as a young man, establish that his friend has never listened to his phenomenally popular podcast nor read his books, complain about not being invited to his wedding, and float the idea of becoming a single father via a surrogate. Is this total honesty, wonders Andy, and more to the point, 'how might the sentiments he was expressing be affected by knowing that I and the others in the Octagon had been referring to him by a synonym for butthole for two decades?'. In another piece, a woman anxiously waiting for the results of a biopsy recalls the kind and attentive man she briefly took to her bed before choosing the husband from whom she now feels too distanced even to tell him her health worries; a mother chatting to her young children suddenly realises that the apparently inconsequential anecdotes her own mother used to tell her were in fact crammed with vital information about the life to come. These are stories that present us with compressed passages of time that open out to reveal a longer, more engagingly meandering view. Elsewhere, the business of art and commerce comes under sharp scrutiny. In Creative Differences, a producer is stunned when a young photographer withdraws from a documentary on the entirely correct discovery that the project is, to all intent and purposes, a disguised commercial; that she may voluntarily forego exposure to maintain integrity is presented as a wild and affronting departure from sanity. Conversely, the artist in A for Alone, who concocts an experimental piece based on the reactionary view that men and women should not spend time together alone without their spouses present, is brought up short by the consequences of her manufactured meetings with her guinea pigs. Throughout, Sittenfeld successfully deploys her brand of low-key, sardonic wit, which combines a clever and sensitive understanding of the pleasure and the pain of nostalgia. And fans of her boarding-school novel of 20 years ago, Prep, will be thrilled at the return of Lee Fiora, whom she pitches into that most dreaded of social gatherings, the school reunion. No spoilers, but suffice to say that Lost But Not Forgotten will be a balm to tortoises everywhere. Show Don't Tell is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Los Angeles Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Show Don't Tell,' Curtis Sittenfeld even treats cringey characters with humanity
Bestselling 'Prep' and 'Romantic Comedy' author Curtis Sittenfeld dwells in the comically awkward. In her utterly diverting collection of 12 short stories, 'Show Don't Tell,' she contemplates youthful insecurity and first love; the quandary of privilege; the satisfactions of friendship; the disappointments of marriage; and the perils of writerly ambition. Her protagonists are mostly women coming into their own or facing down middle age with both a keen sense of the sardonic and a deep reservoir of self-compassion. They can laugh at life's absurdities and challenges — not to mention their own quirks and failures — even as they obsess over them. Sittenfeld's worldview is more utopian than dystopian; Jane Austen-like, she treats her characters with humanity, even when their actions are cringe-inducing. Take Jill, the protagonist of 'White Women LOL.' She's been branded a Karen on social media for confronting five Black restaurant patrons over their presence in an area designated for her friend Amy's birthday party. Pointing out that there's a private event going on, Jill suggests they take their drinks and move elsewhere. 'Do you feel unsafe? Are you going to call the cops?' one of them retorts. Realizing too late that her interference is reading as racist, she attempts to smooth things over. 'This isn't political,' she protests, which only heightens the tension. The exchange is captured on a guest's iPhone and goes viral, after which Jill finds herself watching and rewatching the video, reflecting that 'she was trying harder than usual, harder than she would have done with a group of white people, to seem friendly and diplomatic.' Meantime, friends stop responding to her texts, and she is suspended from her corporate job pending an HR investigation. To repent, she goes to extreme measures to locate her Black neighbor's missing Shih Tzu. This is tricky territory, and Sittenfeld handles it with nuance and aplomb. Jill is at first in disbelief that anyone — especially those close to her — might misinterpret her so egregiously. But thinking back on past events, she wonders if there haven't been times when she's acted out of unacknowledged prejudice and entitlement — a theme that recurs in several of the other stories in this stunning collection, the author's second. The title story, 'Show Don't Tell,' which originally ran in the New Yorker in 2017, is set amid the crucible of a graduate school writing program. Sittenfeld, who earned her master of fine arts in 2001 from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, aptly captures the sense of promise that permeates, as well as the anxieties that strain friendships and egos, in such settings. She's also keenly aware that in terms of who will ultimately succeed in getting published, 'luck falls unevenly.' While waiting to find out who will receive a coveted fellowship, Ruthie hangs out with classmate Bhadveer, a misogynist in the making. He knows he's already gotten one of the spots, but Ruthie is still on tenterhooks. They take turns guessing who else will get the nod. Ruthie speculates that their colleague Aisha is the most likely candidate, but Bhadveer disagrees: 'Great literature has never been produced by a beautiful woman,' he pontificates. When Ruthie denounces the statement as ridiculous, he doubles down: 'There tends to be an inverse relationship between how hot a woman is and how good a writer.' 'That's literally the dumbest idea I've ever heard,' says Ruthie. But Bhadveer presses forward: 'It's because you need to be hungry to be a great writer, and beautiful women aren't hungry.' Many years later, after Bhadveer and Ruthie have become well-known authors, they run into each other on book tour. Bhadveer is perceived as being more 'literary,' on track to win a Pulitzer. Ruthie has had more bestsellers, but 'my novels are considered 'women's fiction.'' This inequity may needle her, but Ruthie is acutely aware that while she is talented, she's also been fortunate. Bhadveer has no such humility. His success hasn't made him any less generous, and now he can't help himself from letting Ruthie know he hasn't read one of her seven novels. He also derides their former classmates with gusto: 'It's funny that no one other than us is successful, isn't it?' Sittenfeld, who edited the 2020 volume of 'The Best American Short Stories,' here saves her best for last. 'Lost But Not Forgotten' revisits Lee Fiora, a character who first appeared in 'Prep.' It's been decades since Lee graduated from Ault, and she finds herself back at the fancy Massachusetts boarding school for her 30th reunion. She's now single and a founder of a prominent nonprofit that supports the incarcerated. Having gone to Ault on scholarship, Lee recalls that 'I always felt I was implicitly apologizing for not being sufficiently rich and preppy and privileged.' The irony is she now recognizes that although she often felt like an outsider at Ault, her attendance at the school made her an automatic insider: 'In all the years since I graduated, I've been reckoning with just how rich, preppy, and privileged I am.' At the reunion, she bonds with Jeff, a student she barely noticed back then. She finds herself opening up to him — and to her longtime friend, Dede — in ways she never would have when she was younger. 'The single biggest difference between my teenage self and my middle-aged self,' she reflects, 'is that I'd once been roiling with thoughts and opinions and yearnings that I suspected were strange or shameful or simply inexpressible, and therefore didn't express them. As I got older, it wasn't the thoughts and opinions that went away; only over time, their suppression.' A radiant contentment pervades these stories. They are retrospective but don't rue the passage of time. This is a writer who's comfortable in her skin. Sittenfeld is a sharp observer of social mores and an astute judge of character, but she's never cruel — she's the opposite of a misanthrope. As Ruthie confides to a visiting writer: 'Some people are annoying. But even the annoying ones — they're usually annoying in interesting ways.' Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah's Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
