SHORT STORIES
Show Don’t Tell
Curtis Sittenfeld
Doubleday, $34.99
In an era when publishers market every second title as ideal book-club fodder, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Show Don’t Tell may actually be the epitome of that overused tag. Often here, these dozen short stories are so artfully ambiguous, the central character’s actions so carefully poised right on the edge of reasonableness that you can imagine a group of half-a-dozen attentive readers each coming to completely different yet justifiable positions on each story.
For instance, you can imagine the debate on the motivations of the woman artist who dines with men to explore the “Mike Pence rule” (the former US vice president infamously refused to have lunch alone with a woman). Is she making a salient point about sexism, inadvertently highlighting contemporary loneliness or using a loophole to break a social norm? Or all of the above? Similarly, would the middle-aged narrator in Giraffe and Flamingo sending her college tormentor a gift be magnanimous or gloating? And just what is really going on in The Marriage Clock, where a film executive travels to Alabama to visit a conservative pastor who has published a hit self-help book?
Long-term readers will recognise and settle into the Sittenfeld voice – lively, wise and always amused rather than judgmental. She’s often slyly funny and occasionally hilarious, as in the tragicomic denouement to White Women LOL, where Jill is accused of racial insensitivity and tries to redeem herself by finding a lost dog. There’s a page-turning juiciness here, an accessibility that only deepens the nuanced exploration of big, topical and often under-explored ideas.
Show Don’t Tell feels like a cohesive collection, with a few recurring fascinations – Sittenfeld’s ongoing examination of powerful women, unconventional intimacies and the institution of marriage. Academia and the creative industries provide the setting for a few stories while multiple others feature a character – often peripheral – who becomes unexpectedly famous or at least notorious. In The Tomorrow Box, for instance, Andy, a happy-enough teacher who has “experienced intermittent confusion about whether there might be some invisible but crucial thing wrong with [him]”, rethinks his assumptions about a now mega-famous old friend when the latter reaches out to catch up for a drink.
Sittenfeld is often slyly funny and occasionally hilarious in this collection of short stories.
Across a consistently impressive career, Sittenfeld has often excelled in crafting persuasive stand-ins for prominent people and institutions; American Wife was a convincing fictionalised portrait of Laura Bush, while Romantic Comedy centred on a writer at a thinly disguised Saturday Night Live. It would be a spoiler to say more but at least one story here plays in this space, offering an enigmatic depiction of a contemporary headline-maker, slowly moving from the periphery of the narrative into closer focus.
Largely eschewing the chin-stroking languor of some short-story collections, these tales sometimes turn on a life-shaking event – an illness, a professional crossroads or a surprise reunion – but the true revelatory moment comes from an unexpected perspective or a jarring realisation rather than the plot mechanics. Often, characters are forced to reckon with their long-held beliefs or reflect on the gaps between the political ideals they espouse and how they actually make day-to-day decisions.
These extended vignettes often consider the fallibility of memory, how what we remember is subjective and self-focused. There’s also a running theme of the elusive nature of ascribing meaning to any given event, yet only Follow Up, in which a woman deals with her “low-level dread”, looks back on an old fling and navigates a health crisis, suffers from foregrounding its metafictional musings on how we decide what lesson we can take from a story.
