“I want to create characters who aren’t flawless but also aren’t ridiculous or incompetent at life.” The protagonist of Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel Romantic Comedy works as a screenwriter for The Night Owls, a popular American sketch show in the vein of Saturday Night Live. Sally Milz, originally from the Midwest, has spent a decade with the show, where her satirical sketches on gender inequality, among other issues, have earned her a reputation as a sharp, funny and highly contemporary writer. Anyone who’s familiar with Sittenfeld’s work will see the obvious parallels.
Her debut novel Prep, nominated for the Orange Prize, was a wry but heartfelt takedown of the elite world of private boarding schools. She followed this with American Wife, an exploration of the gender power dynamics of a high-flying marriage that was loosely based on the life of first lady Laura Bush. Her recent novel Rodham was an overt fictionalisation of another first lady, imagining what the United States would have been like if Hillary Clinton had trumped Trump in the 2016 election. Other publications include the short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It and the novels Sisterland and Eligible. This last book, a retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern America, can be viewed as a precursor to Romantic Comedy, which is essentially a marriage plot novel updated for the 21st century.
Sally isn’t ridiculous or incompetent at life, but for the first half of the book, which takes place over a week of production at the show, it is clear that she’s married to her job. An early marriage to lawyer Mike ended when she was offered a position at TNO and he failed to support her. Since the move to New York a decade ago, she’s spent her time at work, socialising with her colleagues or having the occasional, no strings hook-up on Tinder. A feminist heroine who is easy to root for, she is driven, capable, cerebral, witty and hugely authentic, a woman who won’t settle or capitulate in her private or professional life.
Enter Noah, a famous musician who is filling the position of host at TNO for a week in April 2018. A heart-throb with a fake surfer aesthetic, recently single Noah is a purveyor of naff pop songs, according to Sally at least, who suggests he partake in a skit involving different kinds of cheese. It’s hard to do justice in summary to the humour of these scenes but suffice to say that the week is packed with comic one-liners and set pieces.
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As always with the work of Sittenfeld, there are serious issues underpinning the jokes. Sally is great on calling out subtle or casual misogyny, even when it comes to her own work: “[It] made me see that there was a different way I wrote when, even subconsciously, I was seeking male approval, male sexual approval: a more coy way, more reserved, more nervous about being perceived as angry or vulgar. It was the syntactical equivalent of dressing up as a sexy zombie for Halloween.”
These kinds of details on the mechanics of writing will be of interest to anyone who writes or wants to write, but less so for readers looking to get on with the story. The first half can be slow at times: too much world-building, too much minutiae of the production process, all divulged in a pedestrian prose that seems a step away from the literary style of her short stories or her earlier novels like Prep.
Romantic Comedy is a dialogue-heavy book with plenty of zeitgeist parsing, recalling the work of AM Homes and Sally Rooney. As with these writers, Sittenfeld has a great ear, a dry sense of humour and a talent for compressing big ideas into pithy paragraphs or phrases. The middle section is also Rooney-esque, comprised of absorbing email exchanges between Noah and Sally, though Sittenfeld’s correspondence is considerably more Californian in tone.
In keeping with her reputation as an astutely modern writer, Sittenfeld makes good use of the pandemic both structurally and in terms of plot and character development. “Do you know what people like me call flying commercial?” Sally asks Noah. “We call it flying.” Elsewhere, there’s an epic road trip, a romantic isolation period and a clever ending where Covid acts as the great equaliser, highlighting our common humanity in the face of pervasive illness and death.
Early in the narrative, Sally explains why certain romantic comedies fail: “When one of those movies doesn’t work, it’s usually because it’s horribly written and/or the script hasn’t done the work of convincing you the couple is attracted to each other.” There is no such trouble with her own Romantic Comedy – an engaging, persuasive story about “an act of reckless optimism”, which is to say, the pursuit of love.
