Curtis Sittenfeld's Predictable Insight

For going on two decades now, no one has done female interiority quite like Curtis Sittenfeld. Her novels, each of which manages to straddle the line between serious literature and beach read, are masterful. Each reveals the fascinatingly ordinary humanity of girls and women who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

Sittenfeld’s first novel, Prep (2005), was about a neurotic and self-involved but highly relatable teenager who journeys far from her Midwestern roots and family to attend a tony New England boarding school. Lee Fiora’s story is a simultaneously compassionate and critical first-person narrative, from the perspective of the protagonist as a late twenty or early thirty-something looking back on these adolescent experiences.

Later, Sisterland (2013) reified the lifelong tension between two sisters who love but do not like each other—Kate, a married, suburban stay at home mom who craves being ordinary, and Vi, a single, bohemian psychic working odd jobs and longing for fame—through the unlikely lens of their shared psychic powers.

Meanwhile, American Wife (2008) and Rodham (2020) offered generalizable insights about romance, family, and ambition by richly portraying the imagined private lives of such ungeneralizable figures as Laura Bush and Hilary Rodham (had she never become Hilary Clinton).

Unfortunately, in Romantic Comedy (2023), Sittenfeld seems to have lost her universalist touch.

Protagonist Sally Mills, a single 36-year-old comedy writer employed by a fictional version of Saturday Night Live called “The Night Owl,” (TNO) is indeed a literarily well-crafted, multi-layered character whose psyche is both sympathetically revealed and insightfully critiqued.

But the broad relatability and shared humanity that defined Sittenfeld heroines of yore—from an angsty adolescent to a Midwestern psychic to titanic political figures both Republican and Democrat—is gone.

The comedic sketch most central to the novel’s plot is called “The Danny Horst rule,” named by Sally after a male colleague of average physical attractiveness who nonetheless landed a gorgeous celebrity girlfriend. The joke is supposed to be that mediocre-looking men often go out with prototypically hot women, but the phenomenon never occurs with the sexes reversed. The sketch never gets performed live (Sally cuts it, thinking it would hurt Danny’s feelings to see it run after he’s been dumped).

But Sittenfeld devotes most of the novel’s 300 pages to Sally’s discovery that there are always exceptions—and that she, like a modern-day Jane Eyre, might indeed have attracted a dashing paramour despite her own plainness.

Thus, the arc of Sally’s romantic comedy with handsome aging pop star and recovering alcoholic, Noah Brewster—who is both the host and the musical guest on TNO one night not long before the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the show and all of New York—comprises the bulk of the aptly named Romantic Comedy.

Like Sally’s character, this narrative arc is, as in all Sittenfeld’s work, well-crafted. And the novel is a romantic comedy, alright—but only for those progressive, urban elites that get the joke.

After all, as Sally herself observes, the romantic comedy genre is as much about the heroine’s (and, eventually, the hero’s) personal worldview and idiosyncratic quirks as it is about the typically obstacle-filled development of an intimate relationship. If a reader or a viewer isn’t invested in the interiority of the heroine that an expert writer like Sittenfeld so deftly portrays, she won’t be invested in that heroine’s eventual romantic triumph either.

In Romantic Comedy, Sally’s worldview and quirks are fundamentally off-putting to anyone not beholden to a very particular brand of snarky, above-it-all leftism so solipsistic that its ostensible virtue is inextricable from its presumptive ubiquity among all people with any interiority worth exploring.

The genius of Sittenfeld’s earlier work—Prep and American Wife, in particular—was that the mostly progressive protagonists’ own feelings and assumptions were laid bare in a way that universalized their appeal to the common humanity of those that did not share their worldviews. Even as the books’ plots proceeded according to the heroines’ (and, presumably, Sittenfeld’s) values, the countless details that comprise the interiority with which a master writer like Sittenfeld blesses her characters leaned into, rather than away from, questions about those characters’ respective relationships to the truth—of themselves and of others.

In Romantic Comedy, by contrast, the humor of ostensible laugh lines like “they lived heteronormatively ever after” and skit titles like “Nancy Drew and the Disappearing Access to Abortion” is taken for granted. There is no imbedded awareness that, for many people with real human interiority of their own, what Sally calls “heteronormativity” is so presumptive as to remain simultaneously unspoken and unhostile, while abortion is a sufficiently complex and tragic reality that its unavailability is poor fodder for comedy.

In case Sittenfeld’s assumptions about what constitutes humor aren’t off-putting enough for anyone outside the extremely progressive bubble to which Sally is both physically and psychologically beholden, the novel’s base assumptions about what is deadly serious are even more exclusive and cringe-inducing.

Partly, that’s because part two of the novel is comprised of long emails between Sally and Noah. In these covid-era missives, the lovers-to-be are revealed—to one another and to the reader—without even the filter of first-person narration that Sally provides throughout the first and third parts of the book.

And, well, cringe doesn’t quite cover it.

As the covid lock-downs wend on, the ostensibly funny, now 38-year-old Sally finds zero humor (only opportunities for introspection so angsty and unself-aware that they would be extreme even by teenage standards of yore) in modern phenomena ranging from the societal hypochondria of covid restrictions, to the proliferation of so-called “gender identities,” to the therapeutic needs and body image issues of a 39-year-old male singer whose aging parents have let him down because they can’t quite get on board with the LGBTQ agenda.

Moreover, in perhaps the most unintentionally revealing lines of the whole novel, precisely because they are intended as mere throw-away lines, Sally writes in emails to Noah both “have you gone to any BLM protests this summer?” and “I confess I didn’t know until [my Black friend] told me that it’s true even across class lines that Black women and their babies are much likelier to die in child-birth because of racism/bad healthcare.”

So, Romantic Comedy is for white progressives that find it second nature to process the tragic death of a black person at the hands of a police officer as an opportunity to demonstrate one’s virtue by attending protests—and asking other white people if they, too, have attended protests “this summer”—in the same tone that one might ask about visiting the beach. Apparently, these same white progressives in 2023 now consider it appropriate to lament that a well-to-do black friend—not just the low-income black women to whose poor maternal health outcomes Sally is apparently indifferent—might suffer from “racism/bad health care.”

Anyone that doesn’t share these sophomorically oversimplified and unspeakably solipsistic impulses would find it near impossible to get through Romantic Comedy without a perpetual cringe.

And maybe that’s the point.

In 2023, not even Sittenfeld’s uncommon insight and undeniable talent can withstand the depth of the cultural distance that now separates those like her—a top novelist that moves in the excessively progressive milieu of elite artists—from everyone else.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is an Opinion Contributor at The Hill and a Young Voices Contributor. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, Fairer Disputations, Law and Liberty, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and FemCatholic.