Romantic Company by Curtis Sittenfeld

 

320 pages

Publisher: Doubleday

Release Date: April 6^th, 2023

NetGalley

 

Blurb

A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions. Romantic Comedy is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from New York Times–bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for "The Night Owls," the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the "Danny Horst Rule," poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her...right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.

 

Review

I’ll be honest and admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this book. Would this really be a romance—would it have a romantic arc, would there be angst, would things almost go wrong before (most importantly) concluding on a happy ending?—or was I about to discover the title was Romantic Comedy because the story broke all the rules and didn’t give us that all-important HEA? My concerns only increased when I came across the line “Romance doesn’t require a happy ending”. Spoiler alert: yes! it does.

At the risk of actually spoiling the story, I am going to say here that I worried about nothing. Romantic Comedy is indeed a romance in the truest sense of the word, and a delightful one at that. Allow me to list everything I appreciated.

It was wonderful to have two main characters who have some lived experience under their belt. Both Sally and Noah have been through relationships that didn’t last the course and neither of them is looking for love when they first meet.

The road from meeting each other to ending up together is anything but smooth but the obstacles in their way, self-inflicted as they may be, make sense for who Sally and Noah were. The way they reconnected after a two-year separation (as a result of and during the Covid lockdown) made perfect sense. Whatever angst there was, mostly on Sally’s part, felt realistic and was never overdramatic. And, most importantly, I completely bought the fact that these two, apparently mismatched, characters would find each other.

On a non-romantic level, I loved the insights we got into how a weekly comedy show like Saturday Night Live operates, just as I loved the references to songwriting, performing and music in general.

This story hosts a large cast of secondary characters and all of them were well presented and fully formed.

I also want to give a special shout-out to the ‘Danny Horst Rule’ as introduced in this story. Goodness knows it is true that while society at large happily accepts that average-looking men end up pushing above their weight and connecting with women who are more beautiful and successful than they are, the opposite is almost always met with disbelief and scorn.

And then I have one or two very personal reasons why this book resonated with me. Like Sally in the story, I’m a huge fan of the Indigo Girls and I loved how passionate she was when she spoke about them. Noah’s reflection that he isn’t overly fond of having to play his first-ever hit all the time, also made me smile since I have a daughter who would happily never again play the first song she wrote but finds herself doing so occasionally anyway because it is her granny’s favourite.

I’m looking forward to the ‘official’ reviews of this book when it is released. Provided there will be any, of course. As a rule, romances don’t get reviewed by major newspapers and most other major review sites. It is almost as if romance is less worthy as a genre since it is mostly written and read by women. And that makes me wonder if they’re about to come up with a term like ‘literary romance’. I hope that doesn’t happen for the same reason that I’m not a fan of the term ‘literary thriller’. Adding the word literary to a branch of genre fiction doesn’t achieve anything apart from diminishing the rest of that particular genre. While I’m willing to concede that there are badly written romances and thrillers available, I want to say those are vastly outnumbered by well-written and well-plotted books featuring characters with depth and real stories with real messages. What’s more, who is to decide what is literary and what is not? As with many qualifying definitions, the answer appears entirely arbitrary to me.

Since I don’t want to end my review of this fantastic book with a rant, allow me to summarize my thoughts. Romantic Comedy was fabulous. The story and characters pulled me in from the start, the setting is fascinating, the sparkling dialogue is intelligent, and the overall reading experience was uplifting and very fulfilling. In fact, I enjoyed this book so much that I’ve already recommended it to another person even though it won’t be released for another week or two. For me, this book deserves 5 glorious golden stars!

 

 

Resistance by Val McDermid

 

Art by Kathryn Briggs

Publisher: Profile books

Title in the Wellcome Collection

Graphic Novel

160 pages

 

Blurb

It's the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun - until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?

A heart-racing thriller, Resistance imagines a nightmare pandemic that seems only too credible in the wake of COVID-19. Number one bestseller and queen of crime Val McDermid has teamed up with illustrator Kathryn Briggs to create a masterful graphic novel.

 

Review

You might wonder what possessed me to read a book about a pandemic while living through a pandemic. Good question. I mean, if I want to know how the world reacts to a deadly disease, I just need to turn to my Twitter feed. It is almost as if my curiosity is rather morbid.

Morbid or not, I can’t deny I was curious how a writer like Val McDermid might approach the pandemic. But that was before I discovered that this story was written and performed as a radio play a few years before I first heard the word ‘Covid’. That knowledge was rather disturbing. So much in this story reminded me of everything we’ve been through over the past eighteen months. Especially the early denial of anything really serious happening and governments dithering before taking decisive action was all too familiar. After reading this book I guess we can only be grateful Covid isn’t quite as nasty as the bacterium in Resistance. Because the reason we’re still more or less functioning as a world and haven’t faced larger loss of life has little to do with our leaders being on the ball. While Covid has been devastating, it (so far) isn’t horrific enough to produce the scale of death and destruction as described in this book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fill me with confidence that should things get worse, or should we face a similar but more aggressive epidemic, we will be able to handle it.

I’m not usually a graphic novel reader and I’m not sure if that is going to change. But, for a story as horrific as this the fact that words tend to hit me harder than images meant that graphic was the right way to go. Not that the fear, devastation, and despair are in any way subdued, far from it. But it would have been more difficult (if not impossible) to make my way to the end of this story if everything had been detailed in words.

This cautionary tale is, as I said before, all too realistic, and as such not particularly hopeful. Given everything the world is facing right now, it is a timely tale too. While it is all to tempting to stick our heads in the sand, get on with our lives, and hope that the various disasters approaching us won’t hit during our lives, the time for such an attitude (if it ever existed) is well and truly over. So maybe, while they may be hard to read, we need more, not fewer books like this one. Because we are in dire need of anything that might make more of us think about what we’re doing to our planet and each other. Think first and then, very rapidly, change our ways.

A girl can hope.