{"id":124547,"date":"2018-04-23T11:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-23T15:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124547"},"modified":"2018-04-27T10:35:50","modified_gmt":"2018-04-27T14:35:50","slug":"going-all-the-way-curtis-sittenfeld-and-the-art-of-the-unambiguous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/23\/going-all-the-way-curtis-sittenfeld-and-the-art-of-the-unambiguous\/","title":{"rendered":"Curtis Sittenfeld’s Unambiguous Sophistication"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The definition of what qualifies as \u201cchick lit\u201d (an unpleasant term, besides which, I\u2019ve personally always thought if you were going to coin a sexist word for women\u2019s books, chicktion<\/em>\u00a0has more pizzazz, but I digress) is, in its purest form, a stupid tautology. A book is marketed as chick lit if it broadly appeals to women; books broadly appeal to women if they\u2019re marketed as chick lit. Of course, this definition doesn\u2019t hold up under much scrutiny. For one thing, the category of \u201cfiction that appeals more to women than men\u201d is, as we know, \u201cfiction.\u201d Accordingly, most books are marketed toward women. The Corrections<\/em> was infamously, and briefly, featured in Oprah\u2019s book club and marketed as a family drama, which it is. In this sense, all fiction\u2014and this has been roughly true since the early nineteenth century, when the burgeoningly popular, still somewhat novel novel form, was declaimed as a woman\u2019s art\u2014is chick lit.<\/p>\n

What, then, are the real criteria for membership in this dubious category? Is it books written by women or books that have female leads? Books about the domestic sphere? Clearly not, or not just, as that category would include, for example, Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson. It would seem, then, to mostly come down to an amorphous sense of middlebrow quality or ambition and an accompanying sense that certain popular women writers belong, almost as a function of their popularity, in a kind of gilded literary ghetto. (As Jennifer Weiner noted, male writers of popular fiction like Nick Hornby or Jess Walter are not consigned to \u201cdick lit.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the last few years, however, certain woman writers have come along who thankfully challenge this tiresome paradigm. They are both popular and literary and seem to have no problem standing with a foot in each category. Chief among them is Curtis Sittenfeld, whose story collection, You Think It, I\u2019ll Say It<\/em>,\u00a0arrives on April 24.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Sittenfeld has written several bestsellers, among them Eligible<\/em>, an update of Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice<\/em>. Austen seems the perfect muse for Sittenfeld\u2019s art, as she (posthumously) managed the trick of simultaneously being an enormously popular conventional storyteller and an accepted master of the literary novel. Romance, Austen\u2019s genre, prefigures chick lit. Despite the general speciousness of chick lit as a genre, books categorized as such do often share features with the classic romance form, chief among them an insistence on unambiguity in relationships and relationship outcomes. The reader can reasonably expect to find out if the couple in question gets married in the end, if the separated siblings are reunited, if the family unit weathers the storm.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps an indicator of the excesses of ambiguity in modern fiction that to describe writing as unambiguous feels pejorative. But Shakespeare\u2019s canon features precious little ambiguity when it comes to plot. Ambiguity in terms of motivation, yes\u2014in terms of, at times, a harrowingly modern understanding of character psychology\u2014but not in terms of the marriage (or murder) at the end. A reader of Shakespeare\u2019s era\u2014or Austen\u2019s or Thackeray\u2019s, for that matter\u2014would find a text in which the ending is withheld from the reader to be fundamentally unsatisfying, incomplete in terms of plot, of course, but also moral clarity. An author was expected to make sense of the world\u2014this was the social contract of fiction writing.<\/p>\n

Modernism and postmodernism innovated in part by eliminating the constraints and demands of concrete storytelling; these forms progressively dispensed not only with clear endings and moral frameworks but with sense making in general. The reader\u2019s responsibility when she encountered a text was expanded to include interpretation of actual events, of reality itself. While Modernism is long gone and postmodernism in its pure form survives in only a few grottoes of the literary ecosystem, the impulse toward ambiguity in storytelling remains one of the strongest felt markers of \u201cliterary\u201d quality. In a sense, I would argue, many if not most readers harbor a received and not entirely examined sense of this prejudice: that an ambiguous text is almost by nature more sophisticated than a nonambiguous text.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, nonsense. Plenty of books with discrete boundaries and relationship outcomes are very sophisticated (Ferrante\u2019s My Brilliant Friend<\/em> comes to mind), and plenty of ambiguous texts are not sophisticated but merely vague. No specific names are necessary here, but work for a month at a literary magazine and report back about how sophisticated you find endings where car taillights recede in a fog.<\/p>\n

It has been bracing, in this sense, to find Sittenfeld\u2019s work canonized in the pages of The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere. Her stories are sturdy and well-constructed, narratively comprehensive, and, by modern storytelling standards, disarmingly uncoy. In \u201cGender Studies,\u201d a professor whose husband left her for a younger woman has a brief liaison with a young Trump supporter, then remarries a man who is much like her first husband while still thinking wistfully about MAGA Luke. The plot and narrative tension of \u201cShow, Don\u2019t Tell\u201d (not included in this collection) is premised largely on the question of whether the narrator, a Sittenfeld stand-in, will receive a prestigious writing fellowship and accompanying stipend at the University of Iowa. It would be characteristic of most modern literary short stories, if they even bothered to tell a story about something as wonderfully mundane as grad-school funding, to end the story with the hand on the mailbox, a letter opener cutting into the envelope. We have been conditioned to accept that what happens doesn\u2019t matter and that to want to know the answer is a philistine hunger better satisfied by less rarified media like TV and film. As Joy Williams put it in her speech at this year\u2019s Paris Review<\/em> Spring Revel<\/a>, \u201cThe work of the writer is to keep the story from becoming what it is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sittenfeld\u2019s narrator cuts into the envelope and wins the award. The story ends with a scene, years later, in which she runs into another student from her cohort. He is a literary darling and smarmy misogynist; she is successful, the author of seven popular books. (\u201cMy novels,\u201d she says, \u201care considered \u2018women\u2019s fiction.\u2019 This is an actual term used by both publishers and bookstores, and means something only slightly different from \u2018gives off the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party.\u2019\u2009\u201d) They are the only two from their class who published. This telescoping in time is characteristic in Sittenfeld\u2019s work\u2014you don\u2019t merely find out what happens in the story, you find out what happens throughout the character\u2019s life. She goes all the way.<\/p>\n

As do her characters. \u201cVox Clamantis in Deserto\u201d is narrated by Dana, a likably awkward Midwesterner at Dartmouth. (Many of Sittenfeld\u2019s narrators or leads are likably awkward Midwestern transplants). Over the course of a semester, she develops an intense friendship with a difficult, self-centered girl from New Hampshire, Rae, and a third friend, an ostensibly gay boy named Isaac. On a disastrous trip with Rae to visit Rae\u2019s high school boyfriend, Dana is left behind with said boyfriend, with whom she loses her virginity in a gym locker room. She returns to school, drifts apart from Rae, and a decade later reencounters Isaac, who, it turns out, is not only not gay but also in love with her. They get married and have kids, and she idly wonders what happened to Rae, her former friend who was effectively erased from her life not only by time and circumstance but by five minutes on a locker-room floor.<\/p>\n

Sex in Sittenfeld\u2019s fiction is remorselessly depicted and rightfully accorded the power to alter the course of lives. Whom you sleep with and whom you marry not only speak to who you are\u2014your priorities, your sexual currency\u2014but shape you, determine the trajectory of your existence. Modern literary fiction tends to feature relationships that happen and unhappen for no particular reason and often to no great consequence. Ambiguity again manifests as sophistication\u2014to marry for practical reasons like money seems unbearably old-fashioned. Sittenfeld\u2019s romantic pragmatism\u2014not to say cynicism\u2014is a throwback to the likes of Thackeray, whose calculating antihero Becky Sharp is sympathetic for her clear-eyed calculation amid a bevy of fools and self-deceivers.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Prairie Wife,\u201d the protagonist, Kirsten, obsesses about a Martha Stewart\u2013esque celebrity with a wholesome public persona, a woman with whom she had an intense lesbian experience at camp twenty years earlier. This experience determined Kirsten\u2019s life, exposing her sexuality to her, and it grates on her that the so-called Prairie Wife seems to have moved on, frictionlessly recasting herself as hetero. It makes sense, viewing Sittenfeld\u2019s corpus as a whole, that this would<\/em> grate. Though her pragmatism may be admirable, the Prairie Wife seems to have paid no price for her romantic choices. While the characters in Sittenfeld\u2019s stories are not powerless before their desires\u2014they often choose not to act on their desires, in fact\u2014those choices have consequences that ripple out into their lives in very real ways. The idea of a person blithely moving through their sex life\u2014moving on in a kind of ambiguous space, as it were\u2014is unsettling in this moral universe.<\/p>\n

It is true that at times this desire for narrative and moral definition can bring Sittenfeld\u2019s stories close to predictable, if not pat. This is the risk writers run when they write unambiguous stories: moral clarity is never very far from\u2014is, in fact, sometimes perilously close to\u2014moralizing, presenting the reader with a tidy, gift-wrapped lesson. A truly surprising and successful ending reaches back through a story and restructures a reader\u2019s sense of what they just read, on several simultaneous levels: plot, character, and moral. The difficulty of doing this well may be part of the appeal of ambiguous endings. When a writer like Sittenfeld succeeds, it is a triumph.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It has been noted ad nauseam that Modernism (and postmodernism) arose at least in part as responses to the unprecedented chaos of the twentieth century. The only proper response to destabilizing horrors like the Holocaust and Vietnam was appropriating that destabilization into narrative, in an act of authorial humility. In our own difficult and confusing era (and what era is not those things?), fictional ambiguity continues to represent a virtue if it adds to the complexity and richness of the text. But it seems worth investigating the extent to which we have accepted narrative ambiguity as a merit on its own terms\u2014how this attitude has been absorbed into our cultural notion of \u201chigh\u201d and \u201clow\u201d art and how it informs our sense of, maybe even our desire for, genre categorizations like chick lit. Just as we need art that captures the often formless churn of existence, we also need art with the nerve to follow a story to its end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam<\/span> O\u2019Fallon Price<\/span> is a writer and teacher living in Carrboro, North Carolina. His short fiction has appeared in <\/em>The Paris Review, Vice, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His new novel, <\/em>The Hotel Neversink, will be published in 2019 by Tin House Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The definition of what qualifies as \u201cchick lit\u201d (an unpleasant term, besides which, I\u2019ve personally always thought if you were going to coin a sexist word for women\u2019s books, chicktion\u00a0has more pizzazz, but I digress) is, in its purest form, a stupid tautology. A book is marketed as chick lit if it broadly appeals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33835,33824,13206,33834,300,33827,33828,7285,28388,11942,33825,33833,5425,6007,40,33829,33836,33826],"class_list":["post-124547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-chick-lit","tag-curtis-sittenfeld","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-eligible","tag-jane-austen","tag-jennifer-weiner","tag-jess-walter","tag-joy-williams","tag-my-brilliant-friend","tag-nick-hornby","tag-post-modernism","tag-prep","tag-pride-and-prejudice","tag-thackeray","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-vox-clamantis-in-deserto","tag-womens-fiction","tag-you-think-it-ill-say-it"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCurtis Sittenfeld's Unambiguous Sophistication<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It 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Sophistication","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/23\/going-all-the-way-curtis-sittenfeld-and-the-art-of-the-unambiguous\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/23\/going-all-the-way-curtis-sittenfeld-and-the-art-of-the-unambiguous\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/curtis_sittenfeld-1.jpg","datePublished":"2018-04-23T15:00:24+00:00","dateModified":"2018-04-27T14:35:50+00:00","description":"It seems worth investigating the extent to which we have accepted narrative ambiguity as a merit on its own terms\u2014how this attitude has been absorbed into our cultural notion of \u201chigh\u201d and \u201clow\u201d 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