Into the Sittenfeldverse

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace liking the novels of Curtis Sittenfeld.

Earlier this year I went on holiday with my fiancée and, shortly beforehand, he bought me Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection of short stories, Show don’t tell, to read while we were away. I didn’t take this present well. Imagine, for the purposes of this anecdote, that I am a not unsuccessful ceramicist, and that he is a cardiologist, and that we both live in St Paul, Minnesota, and are between ten and fifteen years older than we actually are, and also married rather than engaged, and are, obviously, American.

“But you love Curtis Sittenfeld!”, he said. “You’ve read loads of her books, and you really enjoy them!”.

This was right, I said, but this was not how I wanted to be seen. “You want a present to reflects the parts of yourself and your taste that you like”, I said, as I stood in the carpeted sewing room on the first floor of our large American house. “Not the parts of yourself that you feel embarrassed about, that need to be improved away”. I felt he might as well have given me the book wrapped with a card that said not “I love you” or “I think you will enjoy this” but “You Are Middlebrow”.

It might here be useful to acknowledge that to go on holiday I had bought for myself:

Hyperpolitics, by Anton Jager

Cameo by Rob Doyle

You are the Fuhrer’s Unrequited Love by Jean Noel Orango

The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow

With the exception of the Bellow, in which the protagonist might have taken a class at college, these are not books that feature in the world of Curtis Sittenfeld. They are also all, obviously, by men. A quick tally reveals that this year so far I have read 26 books, 6 of which were by women (A line flashed through my head, from the copy-pasta about a certain kind of London man that you will either be familiar with or won’t be: he is not egregiously misogynistic but he probably doesn’t read very many books by women).

I explained my problems with being gifted the Sittenfeld stories, with the implicit assessment of my reading level and overall cultural value, and my unhappiness therein, to a friend, who is for the purposes of this anecdote a dental hygienist who is divorcing her husband and planning to move to Madison, Wisconsin to be nearer her mother when she does so. My friend said, “Isn’t this the classic ‘to be loved is to be known’ problem?”.

I took the book of short stories on holiday. The first story (which shares the collection’s title) is about a woman who returns to the institution where she was once an MFA student. Only one other member of her cohort, a man who at the time she had been friendly with, has become a successful writer. His success is a higher brow kind; he wins prizes and is discussed (although she reckons she has sold more books). “He’s the kind of writer, I trust, about whom the current students in the program have heated opinions; I’m the kind of writer their mothers read while recovering from knee surgery. To be clear”, the narrator stresses, “I’m mocking neither my readers nor myself here – it took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous”.

I felt, as they say, quite confronted by this. I want to always just casually be putting down Don Delillo or Uwe Johnson or Ernst Junger. What’s that I’m reading? Oh, it’s just Auerbach’s Mimesis. AS Byatt’s Possession, at the very outside. But to be loved is to be known and I do love the novels of Curtis Sittenfeld, even if I know they are not considered cool or literary. Jilly Cooper has been having a post Rivals resurgence and a friend of mine keeps insisting to me I should read her books because, she says, they float seamlessly into your mind (I tried and honestly: too many horses. I don’t know what I expected). That’s how I feel about Sittenfeld: it flows straight into my mind like offal being sluiced off a floor. It’s like she’s put a metal funnel directly into my brain and in go these books in big teenage single sittings, the kind that Phone and Job have mostly taken from me. I wasn’t recovering from knee surgery but after being controversially gifted them I read the short stories and I liked them and then I read Eligible, which is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice based in Cincinatti, and I liked that too.

I think, in the age we are in, her novels also make for interesting political propositions. If you have heard of her, it is probably for Rodham, a novel with the unforgettable and, yes, mortifying premise: what if Hilary Clinton had rejected Bill Clinton’s proposal of marriage and had had her own political career first? The fact that it includes sex scenes – nothing particularly lurid or out of step with the rest of Sittenfeld’s oeuvre, but nonetheless crucially about Bill and Hillary Clinton – was much commented upon, and it strayed close to meme territory, cultural shorthand that lurked near pussy hats on mood board memes.

That she wrote a book with this premise tells you most of what you need to know about the politics of Curtis Sittenfeld (she also wrote a book about Laura Bush, which imagines the former first lady as a closet liberal, and which is, like all of them, a very good read). The phrase “wine mom” knocks about quite a bit these days, sometimes prefaced with “elizabeth warren” or “normie lib” or something similar. The protagonists in Sittenfeld novels think Donald Trump is really bad and try their best to be progressive. They are not hyper-woke and they exist in worlds with plenty of conservative (and Conservative) people, many of whom are fairly decent.

By way of example, consider Eligible, the Cincinatti Pride and Prejudice, for which you are about to encounter spoilers. In the book, written in 2013, the younger Bennet sisters Kitty and Lydia are airheaded crossfit enthusiasts, sponging off their parents well into their 20s. Lydia has a boyfriend, Ham, an army veteran and gym owner who is portrayed as being considerate, practical, and, in the view of our protagonist Elizabeth, altogether too good for her vapid sister. If you are glancingly familiar with the original Austen novel (which is about how familiar I am: I read it once when I was about 16 but that was half a lifetime ago) you will read this anticipating that Lydia’s beau to turn out to be a wrong’un.

In the Austen, Mr Wickham is an indebted scoundrel who runs away with Lydia; her honour, and that of the family, are only saved by the intervention of Mr Darcy, who negotiates their marriage terms. Sure enough, Sittenfeld’s Lydia also runs away with Ham – but only after Mr and Mrs Bennet learn that he is trans, and are unhappy with their daughter marrying someone who was born female. Elizabeth wants to heal the rift, but ultimately Mrs Bennet is only assuaged by the intervention of Mr Darcy, in this version a surgeon, who tells her that being trans is being born in the wrong body, something akin to a birth defect. This is, as he admits to Elizabeth, not the most medically upstanding nor politically correct line, but it was the one he correctly assessed would best enable the parents to get along with their daughter and son in law. They do all get along in the end, and this is considered important.

Or consider the end of Romantic Comedy, in which a writer for a (very) thinly veiled SNL falls in love with a musician and at the end they ask for donations to a thinly veiled Emily’s List instead of wedding presents. Or the story in Show don’t tell where a woman decides to test the ‘Mike Pence rule’, and deliberately see men she is not married to in one-on-one social settings.

Canonically, these women like Tim Walz and will be at anti-ICE protests faster than you can say “plus size Charlotte Lucas”. They are both very woke (you could never sell the Democrat attempts at compromise on women’s sports, or any equivalent proposals, in the Sittenfeldverse – they were transing Mr Wickham way back in 2013) and in some ways not very woke (certain strains of online left thinking, culture, policy, whatever – police abolition, it being OK not to talk to family members even if they are unpleasant, online debates about whether they were right to kill the Romanovs – would seem completely alien here).

These are novels and stories like legible family homes, about marriage and work, about insecurity and friendship, about the female middle class American experience, which believe that things don’t have to be messy or dramatic to be considered worthy of interrogation and recording. Because of how the internet is and how I was using it up until the bit I used most was destroyed in the early-to-mid 2020s – thanks to Elon Musk, who I’m sure Curtis Sittenfeld really hates – I am perpetually saying, there was a tweet that went something like, and then not being able to find the tweet. But there was a tweet that went something like, young professionals used to be desirable to the Republicans as voter but now all the big Republican politicians retweet posts from guys who want said young professionals to be summarily excited in the lobby of their climbing gym, for the crime of not being based. Not-based women who go to climbing gyms and live in Pennsylvania: Curtis Sittenfeld has the novels for you. And possibly even for me.