Friday, July 7, 2017

A Girl Named Curtis: Gender, Writing, and Ambition in Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Show Don’t Tell”



By any standard, Curtis Sittenfeld is a literary success. The truest indicator of that success, beyond the publication of five novels (most of them bona fide bestsellers), is her seeming ubiquity in the pages of The New Yorker. In the past year alone, Sittenfeld has scored three stories in the most widely read and revered magazine still publishing fiction today. Why, then, does she seem so insecure about her place in modern American letters? And why does that phrase, “modern American letters,” have such a regrettable ring to it?

I ask these questions because Sittenfeld’s most recent New Yorker story, a piece of barely-veiled auto-fiction set in an elite MFA program, raises a stark dichotomy between two fortresses of the American publishing kingdom: the “women’s fiction” Sittenfeld’s first person narrator writes, and the highbrow, high-testosterone Literature that is the province of men like her former classmate Bhadveer. The story, bearing the cheeky title “Show Don’t Tell,” is very good – lyrical in a swift, utilitarian sort of way and taut with an unexpected suspense (will Ruthie, the protagonist, receive proper funding for the program’s next year?). Reading it, I was reminded why Sittenfeld keeps popping up in the magazine’s pages – she’s funny and brisk, and her narrators sound like friends you haven’t seen in a while, friends with riveting dispatches from the more mysterious (but always relatable) frontiers of their inner lives.


But what’s really interesting about “Show Don’t Tell” is the gendered divide, between “women’s lit” and “Men’s Literature,” that Sittenfeld explores in each of the story’s sections. The result is an odd bit of meta-performance on Sittenfeld’s part, simultaneously self-empowering and -lacerating. In the process, Sittenfeld’s Ruthie seems to want it both ways: to cast off a sexist establishment that dismisses women’s literature as girlish chatter; and to beat upon the gates of that establishment, to demand admission and recognition and, if it’s not too much to ask, a big, fat literary prize or two.

Early in the story, Ruthie encounters one of her male classmates – a student “who had recently told [her] that everything [she] wrote gave off the vibe of ten-year-old girls at slumber party” – in the campus bookstore, where he touts Don DeLillo’s Mao II:

Then Harold held up a copy of Mao II and said, ‘If DeLillo isn’t the ombudsman of American letters right now, I’m at a loss as to who is.’

‘I’ve actually never read him,’ I said.

Harold’s expression turned disapproving, and I added, ‘Lend me that when you’re finished and I will.’

‘It’s not mine,’ Harold said. ‘I just come in here and read twenty pages at a time. But seriously, Ruthie – not even White Noise?’

Harold is a stand-in here for that masculinist literary culture, the establishment that props up the white male literary genius, the Roth or Pynchon or McCarthy or DeLillo who aims to capture the entirety of the American experience, the vaster the better, in his books. In comparison, Ruthie’s work, with its vibe of slumber party chit-chat, might seem very slight indeed. But what kind of asshole, the scene asks us, uses “ombudsman” in everyday speech?

“Show Don’t Tell” is full of funny moments like this. For instance, Ruthie’s classmate Bhadveer, in a moment of drunken misogyny, asserts that no beautiful woman has ever produced a lasting piece of literature. This elicits a roll call of attractive, important women writers from Ruthie, including such luminaries as Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, and, finally, Clarice Lispector:
           
‘Wait,’ I murmured to Bhadveer. ‘Clarice Lispector.’

Bhadveer looked momentarily confused then shook his head. He said, ‘Clarice Lispector was nothing special.’

Bhadveer is lying through his teeth, of course, but the entire conversation is ridiculous to begin with.

By the end of the story, years after Ruthie’s graduation from the program, Ruthie has become a successful writer of what she faintly disparages as “women’s fiction,” an “actual term used by both publishers and bookstores… [that] means something only slightly different from ‘gives off the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party.’” Bhadveer, for his part, is a major writer of prize-winning literature, a man of letters who’s “regularly interviewed on public radio about literary culture.” But Bhadveer, Ruthie finds, is still a misogynist and a blowhard. The critical success of his work cannot correct the obvious bankruptcy of his soul.

Finally, the story flashes back to the MFA days and ends with a hug between Ruthie and her neighbor, an older female graduate student currently at work on a memoir. They are celebrating, in this moment of feminine victory, the news that Ruthie has received the program’s highest and most prestigious level of funding. Cue the freeze frame, roll the credits. That’s a wrap!

A story that so astutely illustrates the tensions between so-called women’s fiction and the (arguably fading) Great Man literary tradition can hardly be called slight. But it’s almost as if Sittenfeld wants to emphasize the story’s slightness, to play with and subvert the knotty relationships between gender, ambition, and literary fame. In effect, Ruthie seems nearly self-conscious about the weight and worth of her oeuvre while she simultaneously derides the bloated self-praise of a male eminence like Bhadveer. "Women’s fiction" is thus posed attractively, if tentatively, against the ugly, broad-shouldered ambition of the Literary Establishment.

But isn’t this story ambitious in its own way? Are Ruthie and Sittenfeld protesting too much? And isn’t Sittenfeld a literary eminence herself? The answer to all three questions is yes, even if Sittenfeld – published frequently in The New Yorker, a bestseller and an honest artistic success – is no DeLillo.

You can read “Show Don’t Tell” here.

B-B-B-B-BONUS POST!



Speaking of DeLillo, it’s an odd coincidence that I read “Show Don’t Tell” while taking a break from Falling Man. I’ve been on a brief and enjoyable DeLillo kick, reading Libra and Falling Man in quick succession. Libra, for what it’s worth, is much better than the newer novel – DeLillo’s Oswald is mercurial, complex, somehow brilliant and stupid at the same time, a full-dimensional human being embroiled in the events that would “break the back of the twentieth century.” Falling Man, meanwhile, is comparatively weak, a survivor’s domestic drama that fizzles in an oddly anti-climactic final act. (I guess that’s what you get when you begin your novel with a fiery depiction of 9/11.)

Libra, however, is a tour-de-force of form and style I’d put on par with almost anything I’ve read in recent years – from Sixty Stories to Blood Meridian

Anyway, check out this DeLillo documentary, in which a donnish Don speaks directly to you, the viewer, about his many Big Ideas concerning terrorism, writing, and the power of crowds. The video includes snippets of Libra and, of course, Sittenfeld’s beloved Mao II.



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