Curtis Sittenfeld’s previous novel, Rodham, a counterfactual life of Hillary Clinton, imagined how things might have turned out for her and, by extension, the US had she not married Bill. Among the most audacious of the various novels responding to Trumpism, it yoked high-concept thought experiment to a rompy whole-life saga, to distinctly mixed reviews. If the sniggerers couldn’t get over the novel’s sex scenes, it was perhaps only a mark of a bigger obstacle, which was that the real Hillary loomed unhelpfully in readers’ minds.
The purer pleasure of her zingy new novel deserves more widespread approval. Romantic Comedy – a title of impressively Ronseal-like clarity – is tighter than Rodham but it’s ambitious too, navigating with unfussy panache tricky yet somehow already well-tilled terrain such as Covid-19 and modern celebrity as well as writing itself, a subject few novels manage to portray without accusations of self-indulgence.
It starts in 2018, taking us through a week in the life of its narrator, Sally, a thirtysomething divorcee who writes for The Night Owls, a fictitious New York sketch show resembling Saturday Night Live. The frenzy of her schedule, from Monday afternoon pitch meeting to midweek all-nighter to small-hours “after-after-party”, leaves little time for much beyond dating-app hookups. But when the show’s guest host, heart-throb pop star Noah, starts to flirt – if Sally is reading the signs right – it threatens to upend the logic of the sketch she’s been working on: a routine, gently pointed at a male colleague dating a bombshell actor, about why it is that gorgeous women go out with averagely attractive men, but never the other way around.
