I was immediately struck by the title of Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection of 12 short stories, Show Don’t Tell. That’s because it’s also the name of a narrative technique that allows readers to experience a story through the characters’ actions, words, thoughts and feelings, rather than the author’s explanations. It means that readers can create their own visualisations and conclusions without the author telling them what to think.
And this is exactly what Sittenfeld does. Show Don’t Tell offers slices of life in the American midwest from a middle-aged and mostly female perspective. The stories can be enjoyed casually. Or, they can be read as a more profound exploration of individual and social conflict at a time when the US is on the verge of momentous political change.
The self-contained stories evoke many moods and feelings. Each one is relatable in its own way, and all 12 are addictively consumable in one sitting. Within just a few paragraphs Sittenfeld’s vibrant characters feel familiar. They reflect on their lives and the changes in their desires and hopes. And they regularly wonder about their inherent “goodness” and that of those around them and the world they live in.
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Show Don’t Tell is an exploration of relationships, human emotion, honesty, compassion and contemplation. The stories offer a realistic exploration of life’s ups and downs – comical or otherwise.
What links these the stories are the personal reflections they offer on important political subjects, from the COVID pandemic and tech billionaires, to sex and sexuality, wealth, health, marriage and racism. They represent a contemporary and timely connection to events in the US.
Absurdist America
The book’s title story, Show Don’t Tell, originally published in The New Yorker in 2017, lays the groundwork for the book’s focus on memory. It acknowledges the importance of youth – “when you were, like a pupa, in the process of becoming yourself” – and the cynicism that comes with age and maturity.
The story mentions Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel White Noise (1985), referring to the author as the “ombudsman of American letters right now”. Like DeLillo, Sittenfeld’s work combines tone, style and multiple voices to create a humorous yet mildly absurdist representation of America. Her characters blunder tactlessly into faux pas after faux pas, which made me wince with sympathetic embarrassment or awkward discomfort. There is a cringeworthy quality to some situations and circumstances that feel amusingly relatable, sincere and human.
There’s also a universality that pervades the collection. For example, Creative Differences is ultimately about toothpaste and brushing your teeth. This is the power of Sittenfeld’s work – her ability to slip complex subject matters, such as love, death, and loss, relationships between the sexes, and prejudice, into slice-of-life narratives.
Hidden depths
Despite the absurd or humorous surface nature of the stories, there is a profundity to the collection that lies just below the surface.
The daily low-level dread and sense of disaster that inhabits the protagonist in Follow-Up strikes a chord, again, with DeLillo’s characters’ obsession with death and catastrophe in White Noise. But Sittenfeld gently reminds us that, considering the chaotic past decade, where death, catastrophe and complex political issues have dominated American lives, fear and anxiety are an entirely reasonable emotional response.
She shows that it’s normal to look for human connection and comfort wherever we can find it. America has been turned upside down by a global pandemic, social conflict over sexuality, simmering racial tension and the accumulation of enormous wealth. And Sittenfeld shows us the aftermaths; the differences between then (the 1980s and 90s) and now (the 2020s). She shows us the changes between the innocence of youth and the realities of the post-9/11 and post-COVID world.
This is the strength of the collection – reminding the reader of the universality of actions and emotions. And the authenticity that permeates the stories reminds us that we’re not alone.
This is a clever, witty and moving collection with sometimes achingly real portrayals. The themes that unite the stories showcase women and men at moments of introspection, revealing the diversity and genuineness that permeates the multiple authentic worlds that Sittenfeld creates.
Sarah Trott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
