Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Curtis Sittenfeld can dish an entertaining short story
As its title “You Think It, I’ll Say It” suggests, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut collection of short stories has a dishy feel, and that’s a compliment. Good fiction needs to be at least as interesting as good gossip, which itself is interesting because it unerringly serves up the crucial or conflict-ridden morsels of a story and doesn’t worry about bringing the dull bits to the table.
Just take the first sentence of the first story, “Gender Studies”: “Nell and Henry always said that they would wait until marriage was legal for everyone in America, and now this is the case — it’s August 2015 — but earlier in the week Henry eloped with his graduate student Bridget.” Talk about cutting to the chase.
Or the first sentence of the second story, “The World Has Many Butterflies”: “Julie and Graham had known each other for eight years before they ever played I’ll Think It, You Say It, then they played I’ll Think It, You Say It for a year before Julie decided — decided, really, idiotically fabricated the belief that — she was in love with Graham.” Over and over, Sittenfeld zeros in on the fascinating aspects of each narrative, recounting the juicy and often unflattering parts in a colloquial and conversational voice, as when she has Julie think of both Graham and her husband, Keith, “But neither of them was, like, hot.” The game in this particular piece — which provides the title of the book — involves Julie expressing out loud the unkind judgments she believes Graham might be making about their fellow acquaintances, and the collection overall operates by way of establishing a similar intimacy through acute observation.
The 10 stories here — several of them previously published in such venues as The New Yorker and Washington Post Magazine — also understand that gossip, when it’s fun, is entertaining because the listener feels a stake in the people being talked about. Sittenfeld proves adept at quickly establishing characters in whom the reader feels inclined to invest immediately.
The best-selling author of five novels, including most recently “Sisterland” in 2013 and “Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice” in 2016, Sittenfeld makes writing lively and diverting fiction look easy, though each deceptively simple and breezy story is masterfully paced and crafted. Witty and buoyant, Sittenfeld delivers her characters to her audience with bemused perspicacity and above all affection.
Not unlike Jane Austen, to whom her last novel paid homage, Sittenfeld offers a perceptive, light and tasty depiction of human scandal and embarrassment. Sometimes her takes are droll, as when a character thinks of her new husband, “Jason himself seemed perfectly relaxed — he pretty much always does, which is one of his best qualities except when it’s infuriating.” And sometimes they’re melancholy, as when the confirmed bachelor protagonist of “Plausible Deniability” thinks: “Oh, our private habits, our private selves — how strange we all are, how full of feelings and essentially alone.”
No matter her tone, Sittenfeld remains humane in her treatment of her characters and their foibles. One could almost say of her skills as a narrator what Dana, the university student heroine of “Vox Clamantis in Deserto,” says of her friend Isaac: “Isaac was so much more articulate than I was that I might have found him intimidating if not for the fact that he was nice; though he’d make damning observations about people, he seemed to be simply stating facts rather than relishing their weaknesses.”
Sittenfeld has written an entertaining book about basically decent (albeit flawed), mostly middleaged people doing the best they can in a confusing, disappointing and touching world; it’s a funny and moving comfort (albeit a comfort with an edge) to encounter the sometimes salacious and always most salient parts of their lives. The reader leaves the book delighted to have gotten to hear Sittenfeld say just what she really thinks.