You Think It Ill Say It Book Review
Fiction
The Heroines in Curtis Sittenfeld'south First Story Drove Are All Grown Up
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You lot Recollect IT, I'LL SAY IT
By Curtis Sittenfeld
226 pp. Random Firm. $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, so cauterized them with an ending. This is non the case in "You Think It, I'll Say It," a new book of brusque fiction past Curtis Sittenfeld; but as if to dispatch even the possibility of that impression, the kickoff 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 Urban center cabdriver who is dropping her at her hotel. That misguided assumption turns out to be the first of many she makes over the class of the evening she ultimately spends with the commuter: It takes longer than information technology 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 enlightened of her own smugness (which, at its worst, takes the form of bad faith). The characters in Sittenfeld's novels are oftentimes redeemed by their cocky-criticism; however flawed their behavior, they have the adept sense to exist riddled with self-dubiety nigh it. Her female person characters in particular examine, worry over and question their ain dispositions. "And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed?" wonders Hannah Gravener, the judgmental and disappointed narrator of "The Homo of My Dreams." "Or is it simply certain people, and tin can she choose not to be ane of them — can she choose this without also, similar her mother, just giving in?"
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Hannah is the kind of person who frets, while taking in the grandeur of Alaska, about the mode that "thoughts about how pocket-sized 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'south blockbuster debut, she portrayed a middle-class young woman attention an elite boarding school, someone self-witting about being self-conscious. Fifty-fifty the lovely but traumatized Alice Lindgren, a stand-in for Laura Bush-league in her novel "American Wife," observes with fascination her hubby and his brother'south crass bath humour, which betrays the privileged swagger of the blissfully oblivious. Especially in her earlier work, Sittenfeld's immature women practise not exactly resent the relative ease with which others — the cute, or the moneyed, or the innately, effortlessly good — seem to navigate the world; they report their means, quixotically, tormented by those qualities or behaviors they don't empathise.
This collection is Sittenfeld's sixth book; the adolescents of her before work have grown up, with machismo yielding decidedly mixed results. In "The Earth Has Many Collywobbles," 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 earth of aspirational child rearing. Without an beholden audience for the mostly damning asides of her internal monologues, she falls for the get-go human being who seems attuned to them, disruptive an open up 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 oral fissure 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 "Practice-Over," post-obit Trump's ballot, a divorced financier resolves to apologize to an quondam female friend about a moment of sexism that gave him an unfair advantage over her in a educatee election dorsum at boarding school. He is surprised when the woman, who had a crush on him every bit a teenager, does not forgive his late-to-the-game moral enkindling. Over the form of a dinner out, she turns so hostile it is about exhilarating, the good girl, the brainy girl, for once saying exactly what she thinks. (The story, similar the start in the collection, summons the spirit of Lorrie Moore's perfect "You're Ugly, Too.") "Isn't it weird how I was tormented every bit a teenager by a person who grew upwardly into a banker who talks endlessly nigh 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'southward characters, the lusts and disappointments of youth loom big well into middle age, as insistent as a gang of loud, showy teenagers taking upward all the oxygen in the room. A married adult female 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 run into with the popular girl from her high schoolhouse, 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 than generous; others suggest, more spikily, that there is no promise of leaving behind what was painful, or of recovering what was skilful.
These storytellers are, for the nearly role, a privileged, educated lot. Their trials, in the grand scheme of things, are manageable enough that they let easily for comedy, which Sittenfeld is a pro at delivering in the details (the smug academic's cat is named Converse, "non 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 cutting through the ennui of fifty-fifty the near comfortable lives. In "Plausible Deniability," an eligible man who can't seem to class meaningful attachments grows reliant on daily emails from a woman conveying her thoughts on classical music: "Existence in touch on 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 machismo." She thinks they are having an emotional affair; he tells himself it is much less.
The women of "You Remember It, I'll Say It" are, as a group, a demanding breed. They oftentimes assume the worst in their imagined adversaries. Sometimes they are incorrect, but they are right virtually just enough (and funny enough) that we forgive them. And, because they know they demand absolution for their own worst motives, we forgive those, too.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/books/review/curtis-sittenfeld-you-think-it-ill-say-it.html
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