The Heroines in Curtis Sittenfeld’s First Story Collection Are All Grown Up

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/books/review/curtis-sittenfeld-you-think-it-ill-say-it.html

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YOU THINK IT, I’LL SAY IT By Curtis Sittenfeld 226 pp. Random House. $27.

Story collections from novelists sometimes give readers the sense that the author has dug up several half-finished, long-abandoned works from graduate school, dusted them off, revived them, then cauterized them with an ending. This is not the case in “You Think It, I’ll Say It,” a new book of short fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld; but as if to dispatch even the possibility of that impression, the first story, “Gender Studies,” is placed squarely in the context of the most recent presidential election. “There’s no way Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” Nell, an academic, tells a Kansas City cabdriver who is dropping her at her hotel. That misguided assumption turns out to be the first of many she makes over the course of the evening she ultimately spends with the driver: It takes longer than it should for her to realize she has both been misled and done some misleading of her own.

Nell is sympathetic, insomuch as she is at least aware of her own smugness (which, at its worst, takes the form of bad faith). The characters in Sittenfeld’s novels are often redeemed by their self-criticism; however flawed their behavior, they have the good sense to be riddled with self-doubt about it. Her female characters in particular examine, worry over and question their own dispositions. “And underneath all the decorum, isn’t most everyone judgmental and disappointed?” wonders Hannah Gravener, the judgmental and disappointed narrator of “The Man of My Dreams.” “Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them — can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?”

Hannah is the kind of person who frets, while taking in the grandeur of Alaska, about the way that “thoughts about how small you are always feel small themselves.” A psychic young mother who narrates Sittenfeld’s “Sisterland” is uncomfortable with her powers, as if they were mostly a crippling embarrassment. In “Prep,” Sittenfeld’s blockbuster debut, she portrayed a middle-class young woman attending an elite boarding school, someone self-conscious about being self-conscious. Even the lovely but traumatized Alice Lindgren, a stand-in for Laura Bush in her novel “American Wife,” observes with fascination her husband and his brother’s crass bathroom humor, which betrays the privileged swagger of the blissfully oblivious. Especially in her earlier work, Sittenfeld’s young women do not exactly resent the relative ease with which others — the beautiful, or the moneyed, or the innately, effortlessly good — seem to navigate the world; they study their ways, quixotically, tormented by those qualities or behaviors they don’t understand.

This collection is Sittenfeld’s sixth book; the adolescents of her earlier work have grown up, with adulthood yielding decidedly mixed results. In “The World Has Many Butterflies,” that type of young woman — the kind who cracks wise from a crouched position — is now a suburban Houston housewife who has fallen into a world of aspirational child rearing. Without an appreciative audience for the mostly damning asides of her internal monologues, she falls for the first man who seems attuned to them, confusing an open ear with erotic interest: “She was simultaneously shocked by the conversation, shocked to be having it with a man, shocked by its effortlessness, and not surprised at all; it was as if she’d been waiting to be recognized, as if she’d never sung in public, then someone had handed her a microphone and she’d opened her mouth and released a full-throated vibrato.”

In this collection, Sittenfeld occasionally swerves from the female point of view to the male who, elsewhere in her fiction, is usually the object of so much obsessive rumination. In “Do-Over,” following Trump’s election, a divorced financier resolves to apologize to an old female friend about a moment of sexism that gave him an unfair advantage over her in a student election back at boarding school. He is surprised when the woman, who had a crush on him as a teenager, does not forgive his late-to-the-game moral awakening. Over the course of a dinner out, she turns so hostile it is almost exhilarating, the good girl, the brainy girl, for once saying exactly what she thinks. (The story, like the first in the collection, summons the spirit of Lorrie Moore’s perfect “You’re Ugly, Too.”) “Isn’t it weird how I was tormented as a teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?” she asks her former classmate, who is mild, earnest and no longer smoking hot. “Did I offend you?…I didn’t mean to. I was trying to be factual.”

In the lives of Sittenfeld’s characters, the lusts and disappointments of youth loom large well into middle age, as insistent as a gang of loud, showy teenagers taking up all the oxygen in the room. A married woman is obsessed with an ex-girlfriend from summer camp who became a wholesome megabrand known as “The Prairie Wife” (also the name of the story); in “A Regular Couple,” a famous defense attorney who has just married is plagued by an encounter with the popular girl from her high school, who is also honeymooning at the same resort. Some of the stories grant the possibility that the characters have grown in the intervening years, and grown softer, more generous; others suggest, more spikily, that there is no hope of leaving behind what was painful, or of recovering what was good.

These storytellers are, for the most part, a privileged, educated lot. Their trials, in the grand scheme of things, are manageable enough that they allow easily for comedy, which Sittenfeld is a pro at delivering in the details (the smug academic’s cat is named Converse, “not for the shoe but for the political scientist”).

But Sittenfeld doesn’t shy away from poking at the soft spots of a person’s psyche, the painful longings for something exquisite to cut through the ennui of even the most comfortable lives. In “Plausible Deniability,” an eligible man who can’t seem to form meaningful attachments grows reliant on daily emails from a woman conveying her thoughts on classical music: “Being in touch with her offered a cushioning to my days, an antidote to the tedium and indignity of being a person, the lack of accountability of my adulthood.” She thinks they are having an emotional affair; he tells himself it is much less.

The women of “You Think It, I’ll Say It” are, as a group, a demanding breed. They often assume the worst in their imagined adversaries. Sometimes they are wrong, but they are right about just enough (and funny enough) that we forgive them. And, because they know they need absolution for their own worst motives, we forgive those, too.