Curtis Sittenfeld’s new short story collection ‘Show Don’t Tell’: review

Bestselling “Prep” and “Romantic Comedy” author Curtis Sittenfeld dwells in the comically awkward. In her utterly diverting collection of 12 short stories, “Show Don’t Tell,” she contemplates youthful insecurity and first love; the quandary of privilege; the satisfactions of friendship; the disappointments of marriage; and the perils of writerly ambition. Her protagonists are mostly women coming into their own or facing down middle age with both a keen sense of the sardonic and a deep reservoir of self-compassion. They can laugh at life’s absurdities and challenges — not to mention their own quirks and failures — even as they obsess over them. Sittenfeld’s worldview is more utopian than dystopian; Jane Austen-like, she treats her characters with humanity, even when their actions are cringe-inducing.

Take Jill, the protagonist of “White Women LOL.” She’s been branded a Karen on social media for confronting five Black restaurant patrons over their presence in an area designated for her friend Amy’s birthday party. Pointing out that there’s a private event going on, Jill suggests they take their drinks and move elsewhere. “Do you feel unsafe? Are you going to call the cops?” one of them retorts. Realizing too late that her interference is reading as racist, she attempts to smooth things over. “This isn’t political,” she protests, which only heightens the tension. The exchange is captured on a guest’s iPhone and goes viral, after which Jill finds herself watching and rewatching the video, reflecting that “she was trying harder than usual, harder than she would have done with a group of white people, to seem friendly and diplomatic.” Meantime, friends stop responding to her texts, and she is suspended from her corporate job pending an HR investigation. To repent, she goes to extreme measures to locate her Black neighbor’s missing Shih Tzu.

This is tricky territory, and Sittenfeld handles it with nuance and aplomb. Jill is at first in disbelief that anyone — especially those close to her — might misinterpret her so egregiously. But thinking back on past events, she wonders if there haven’t been times when she’s acted out of unacknowledged prejudice and entitlement — a theme that recurs in several of the other stories in this stunning collection, the author’s second.

The title story, “Show Don’t Tell,” which originally ran in the New Yorker in 2017, is set amid the crucible of a graduate school writing program. Sittenfeld, who earned her master of fine arts in 2001 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, aptly captures the sense of promise that permeates, as well as the anxieties that strain friendships and egos, in such settings. She’s also keenly aware that in terms of who will ultimately succeed in getting published, “luck falls unevenly.”

While waiting to find out who will receive a coveted fellowship, Ruthie hangs out with classmate Bhadveer, a misogynist in the making. He knows he’s already gotten one of the spots, but Ruthie is still on tenterhooks. They take turns guessing who else will get the nod. Ruthie speculates that their colleague Aisha is the most likely candidate, but Bhadveer disagrees: “Great literature has never been produced by a beautiful woman,” he pontificates. When Ruthie denounces the statement as ridiculous, he doubles down: “There tends to be an inverse relationship between how hot a woman is and how good a writer.” “That’s literally the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” says Ruthie. But Bhadveer presses forward: “It’s because you need to be hungry to be a great writer, and beautiful women aren’t hungry.”

Many years later, after Bhadveer and Ruthie have become well-known authors, they run into each other on book tour. Bhadveer is perceived as being more “literary,” on track to win a Pulitzer. Ruthie has had more bestsellers, but “my novels are considered ‘women’s fiction.’” This inequity may needle her, but Ruthie is acutely aware that while she is talented, she’s also been fortunate. Bhadveer has no such humility. His success hasn’t made him any less generous, and now he can’t help himself from letting Ruthie know he hasn’t read one of her seven novels. He also derides their former classmates with gusto: ”It’s funny that no one other than us is successful, isn’t it?”

Sittenfeld, who edited the 2020 volume of “The Best American Short Stories,” here saves her best for last. “Lost But Not Forgotten” revisits Lee Fiora, a character who first appeared in “Prep.” It’s been decades since Lee graduated from Ault, and she finds herself back at the fancy Massachusetts boarding school for her 30th reunion. She’s now single and a founder of a prominent nonprofit that supports the incarcerated. Having gone to Ault on scholarship, Lee recalls that “I always felt I was implicitly apologizing for not being sufficiently rich and preppy and privileged.” The irony is she now recognizes that although she often felt like an outsider at Ault, her attendance at the school made her an automatic insider: “In all the years since I graduated, I’ve been reckoning with just how rich, preppy, and privileged I am.”

At the reunion, she bonds with Jeff, a student she barely noticed back then. She finds herself opening up to him — and to her longtime friend, Dede — in ways she never would have when she was younger. “The single biggest difference between my teenage self and my middle-aged self,” she reflects, “is that I’d once been roiling with thoughts and opinions and yearnings that I suspected were strange or shameful or simply inexpressible, and therefore didn’t express them. As I got older, it wasn’t the thoughts and opinions that went away; only over time, their suppression.”

A radiant contentment pervades these stories. They are retrospective but don’t rue the passage of time. This is a writer who’s comfortable in her skin. Sittenfeld is a sharp observer of social mores and an astute judge of character, but she’s never cruel — she’s the opposite of a misanthrope. As Ruthie confides to a visiting writer: “Some people are annoying. But even the annoying ones — they’re usually annoying in interesting ways.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.