Year in (Book) Review: The Man of My Dreams

1. Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Okay, it's February third and I'm already all off track. This is why I don't ever write series of things, because I'm too damn disjointed and lazy to maintain any kind of thread. But I've been doing the reading, and I committed to logging every book I read, and I'm determined not to slack off only thirty two days into the year. Dammit.

Book review number two is The Man of My Dreams (no comments from the peanut gallery, please - whatever snide comment you're thinking of, I've already thought it too) by Curtis Sittenfeld, a young author I have a total girl-on-girl-writer crush on. This was actually her second of three books, but I've read both of her others already. Her first was Prep, and immediately garnered her a lot of attention from the literati. Most recently she published American Wife, a sort-of made up biography of Laura Bush. Hard to imagine that could be riveting reading, but it so is.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I think a great deal of my obsession over Ms. Sittenfeld (yes, her name is Curtis, and yes, she's a she) comes from completely coveting her career. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, sort of the holy land for creative writers. Businessfolk have Harvard, lawyers have Yale, musicians have Juilliard, and writers have Iowa. I personally don't think that's really fair, no offense to Iowa, but whatever. She is spoken of in almost deferential tones from the likes of The New York Times Book Review and fellow authors like Alice Munro. She's from southern Ohio, she's about my age, and she writes exceptionally, exquisitely well. That would be Stone 2, Sittenfeld 3, for anyone keeping score up to this point.

But more specifically, I'm a little obsessed with the fact that CS always seems to be writing to/about me. Yes, that can be said about a lot of authors. In fact, you could argue that if it can't be said about you, you're probably not a very good author in the first place. After all, what audience cares about people they can't relate to? We see bits and pieces of ourselves in even the most out there, outrageous characters. The interesting thing about Sittenfeld's characters -- Hannah, for example, our subject in MoMD -- is that they are so very different from me, and yet so very in tune with me. Hannah, much like Prep's Lee, is a bit... out of sorts, let's say. Her story begins at age 14. Her parents are divorcing. She's got big boobs. By the time she's a twenty year old college junior, she's a near loner, with crushes but no real connections. We get no real perspective from any other characters on how she is perceived by her peers. We watch her relationship with her sister twist and turn, her relationships with men, her parents, and her coworkers do the same. And that's about as dramatic as it gets. So how on earth does Sittenfeld manage to completely enthrall me?

All of the author's protagonists are blissfully, boringly normal. Just like the rest of us, really. And that is the magic of this book, like the others -- there is something so very comforting and reassuring in reading that the small, sometimes really wonderful, often really painful moments that make up our lives are important enough to work their way into print. She writes so subtly that her characters' neuroses drift along on the pages almost invisibly, even as you read page after descriptive page. And that is her gift: universal appeal. She sneaks up on you. Her books are character- rather than plot-driven, and her readers are afforded the chance to catch a glimpse of their own lives -- their own ordinaryness -- because there is tremendous ease in not being alone in either your craziness or your plainness. I'm not the kind of girl people write about. You're probably not either. I'm not eccentric. Or beautiful. I'm not (all the way) crazy, or gifted, or evil or bilingual. I live my pretty boring life; and I am simply, happily, a Curtis Sittenfeld novel waiting to happen.

Read her for her beautiful, almost melancholy use of language. Read her for her ability to describe something in poignant (a word chronically overused in her reviews) detail without ever indulging in flowery excessiveness. Read her and tell me what you think, because someday I really hope to be her, so I really hope you like her too.