September was an active month for reading, in part because the return of in-person teaching meant that I had a lot more commute time for ebooks. October’s continuing in that vein, not least because we are battling a massive mold-remediation project with vast arsenals of vinegar-spray, furniture conditioner, and tea tree oil, which leaves me with many an hour to while away with busy hands and idle ears.

So yesterday I started in on Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel (the first I’ve read of hers), Romantic Comedy, oily rag in hand, trying desperately not to sneeze as I struck up clouds of mold-tinged dust. I’ll just listen to the first chapter, I thought in the morning, and next thing I knew I was sitting in bed after midnight, wide-eyed, listening to the epilogue.

The premise here is a classic rom-com, as many have noted: it’s not a deconstruction or a satire of the genre, and it is not, thank god, interested in sneering at it, a high-cultural impulse that is rooted in deep misogyny. Sally is a writer for an SNL-à-clef called “The Night Owls” or “TNO,” appalled by the idea of performing in the weekly skits and hiding the details of her job from the guys she casually hooks up with. When her office-mate, a clever, belching, aggressively normal dude, meets Hollywood’s A-list starlet du jour while she hosts an episode of TNO, and they get engaged after a whirlwind romance, Sally loses her patience. This is the third or fourth case of a male TNO writer’s dating or marrying out of their league - a woman considerable wealthier, more successful, more famous, and more conventionally beautiful than he is. Society just accepts this as par for the course. But why, Sally asks in a skit, does this rule not apply to celebrated men and typical women? (It doesn’t occur to Sally, a consummate expert at the peak of her career, that she is hardly typical.

This is the impediment when Noah, the most famous pop star in the country, brings his beachy (slightly aged) heartthrob looks and cheesy (Sally’s word) hit songs to the hosting gig. He seeks her out for writing advice, she realizes he’s not a status-flaunting dodo, they banter, she panics, and everything falls apart when she lobs a resentful comment about men who just date models at him.

This book is a perfect artifact of the internal experience of a recent historical moment. Noah comes to host (and Sally writes her sketch about the inequities of celebrity dating) in 2018, when the American social landscape is shot through with a sense of doom about gender exploitation and the rise of Trump. The anxieties the alienate Sally and Noah from each other, despite their obvious compatibility, are suffused with the justified anger that the Weinstein and Cosby scandals, not to mention the discourse surrounding Clinton and Trump, had dragged to the surface in the preceding years.

But then there’s a record-scratch time leap of two years, as the novel shifts to the epistolary form. Stuck in lockdown, and recovering from a terrifying case of COVID in the very first US wave, Noah sends a questing email into the abyss: is Sally still to be found at this address? If so, he’s sorry for how their nascent friendship ended. Sally is still to be found at this email, as it turns out, but she fled the city when lockdown began, horrified by her quick descent into isolation and near-starvation, and is living in her childhood bedroom in her step-father’s house in Kansas City. What follows is one of the best literary descriptions I’ve seen so far of how scary and high stakes everyday life and its most basic actions in 2020 were and felt. The painful details of caring for a sick octogenarian become, in breathtaking (pun intended) fashion the grand gesture of romance that levels all distinctions between the lovers. It’s a testament to how well Sittenfeld renders these chapters that, although I am one of the least COVID-denying or -normalizing people I know (I still mask everywhere public and avoid unmasked indoor encounters in 2023), I was taken aback by this vision of a society where privileged people were still extending caution and care and worry - I hadn’t almost forgotten that this was even possible. Such is the gravitational pull of the Normal towards erasure.

Genre is essentially a marketing construct, which is to say there is little essential and everything constructed about it. This is marketed as literary fiction, and it is a classic romance, very well wrought, as are many that are marketed as Harlequin-style mass-markets. I’ve been trying to work out my ambivalences about that - I’m glad if it gets a greater readership or acceptance for the genre, a genre that has kept publishing afloat in many ways, especially since the rise of ebooks. But I’m wary of the allure of respectability politics. Why does this novel get such acclaim and acceptance, when so many equally excellent ones published as romances don’t? How would this book have been received by reviewers at major newspapers if it had had a couple in passionate embrace on the cover?