Romantic Comedy

Curtis Sittenfeld, 2023

Another novel that doesn’t have much to do with mothers, but if there are any concerns about returning to that topic — not to worry. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

In the meantime, I have to rave about the first novel I’ve read by Sittenfeld. Quick summary: Sally is a cynical comedy writer for something like Saturday Night Live, where she meets and hits it off with a wildly famous musician.

This is one of those rare books that offers solid literary, high-brow commentary on the world today, while also being a fun, page-turning read. While not like these novels, I put it in the same category as The Push and Fleishman is in Trouble.

I did not know that Sittenfeld’s thing is to take a real life person or event and build a novel around it. I love this premise, and thanks to the book group at the lovely Real Magic bookshop in Wendover for pointing this out. I was deeply impressed with the detail on working at a live comedy weekly, like SNL. This was some Ian McEwan level research (but much more fun to read than the ins and outs of medical surgery like in Saturday). Additional kudos for Sittenfeld creating a believable comedy writer narrator in Sally. As far as I know, she was not previously a comedy writer, but she deftly pulls this off.

The novel is split into three parts. In the first we get an almost hour-by-hour account of the week Noah (the musician celebrity) guest hosts the show. In most literary novels it feels as if we are snooping on the narrator, reading their private thoughts. But in this case the narrator is conspiratorial, sharing them with us like we’re new best friends. This section was a bit hard to get into. I loved feeling like I was on Sally’s arm as she moved around her unconventional office. If someone said something to her that required some background knowledge, she’d fill me in before responding. As the reader, I was there as her friends bantered about scripts and shared dating advice. At the same time, the narration was so informal that the sentences were sometimes difficult to make sense of, and Sally — while super friendly — by virtue of her cynicism, holds the reader at a distance.

The second section is epistolary, which I typically loathe as lazy, but this worked incredibly well in Romantic Comedy. Here Sally begins to let down her guard and share more details about her life before the novel begins. The third part returns to Sally’s narration, where she is forced to decide what she wants and whether to allow her quiet work life confidence spill over to her real life. Here it feels as though we finally break down the barriers and get to know her for real. This is incredibly gratifying, given the barriers set at the start. Three stars.