Romantic Comedy
God I loved this book. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Maybe it’s a bit of a dumb comparison but the feeling of reading it was the same I had when I watched the ending of Picard. It just gave me everything I wanted right now.
The first sentence is really modern day Jane Austen:
“You should not, I’ve read many times, reach for your phone first thing in the morning — the news, social media, and emails all disrupt the natural stages of waking and create stress— which is how I’ll preface the fact that when I reached for my phone first thing one morning and learned that Danny Horst and Annabel Lily were dating, I was furious.”
I’ll get my jealousy out of the way first, haha, but I have long wanted to write a novel where the female protagonist is less gorgeous than the male in a romantic comedy situation. Nothing stopping me from still doing this of course, and honestly, I’m not really jealous because I don’t and couldn’t write like Sittenfeld. I am super happy to read this kind of writing though. So.
This isn’t a review of the book, but rather an admiration. Some fun things about it are the mention of the Indigo Girls who I listened to non-stop back in the day. I was thrilled to see them mentioned, and then after I read the book, found out that Brandi Carlile had covered Closer to Fine for the Barbie movie. LOVE THAT. (Haven’t seen the movie yet but am going to….can’t wait).
(Brandi Carlile is of course the forever hero for her work with Joni Mitchell IMHO).
In the Sittenfeld book, the song that comes up is Dairy Queen by the Indigo Girls and which is said to be “non-cheesily romantic.” I think dissertations will be written about this book at some point — all the stuff CS is doing and playing with regarding the rom com category in movies and the romance genre both historical and contemporary in fiction.
One of the things that I really admire is that the book takes into account the pandemic. And before you balk, I gotta say it works, and keeps it all real for me. I mean, plot twist or what?
You romance fans will remember that Jane Austen was criticized for having ignored the stuff going on in the world in her novels. (And since, this has pretty much been shouted down as “an ancient canard” (one can never use the word canard often enough)). And Sittenfeld, same, you know? She weaves it into the book but without being heavy-handed about it at all. She captures a lot of the emotions a lot of us felt around the time, and the fact that things happened that might not have otherwise happened. Romances in real life, for example!
I mean, during the pandemic everyone was madly reading romances! Various places site that sales in romance fiction went up 49%. During the pandemic I toyed with the idea of writing a romance that was made up of cobbled together sentences from other romances. (But then, hey, AI can do that if it wants). Anyway, the thing is, in the “regular” genre romances, you are not likely to see a mention of the pandemic because: “Calgon take me away” and all that.
I read RomComs during the pandemic because I desperately needed a happy ending. I could not read novels where I didn’t know how things were going to end. (I’m fine now, like, bring on the disaster, but then, no way no thank you). I read novels I had read before, and I skimmed endings of novels I hadn’t before reading them just to be on the safe side. Honestly, I just mainly shied away from literary novels for a while.
I think up until now, if you told me to read something that referenced the pandemic I would have set it aside. But Sittenfeld does it so expertly. You hardly know it’s happening until it happens and then we’ve moved forward. As a plot device, it works in the way that Austen had Frank Churchill disappear in Emma because of his ill aunt’s demands. A person could probably make Jane Austen comparisons and contrasts all day with this novel. You might remember Sittenfeld’s book Eligible, a riff or re-telling of P&P, getting more or less pilloried in the big newspapers. This must have been quite unpleasant for the author…I remember reading Eligible quite happily, and congratulate myself now on having skipped the reviews at the time.
In short, I read Romantic Comedy in two sittings, in the sun in my backyard and enjoyed every second of it. And that’s not something I say for every novel I read.