Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the nineteenth one.
Boredom. My best friend for most of elementary school was the smartest girl in the entire school. She knew everything, not in an arrogant way, but in a calm, self-confident, mysterious way, like she was plucking thoughts and facts and calculations out of some huge, invisible-to-me well. In second or third grade, I told her, I bet you could figure out how to fly a plane if you had to. She said that based on movies she’d seen, the first thing she’d do is…my attention wavered as she answered. But she clearly knew what she was talking about, and I would have felt safe with her as my pilot. Her favorite book was Pale Fire. Once, in fourth or fifth grade, I was really mad at someone for something, I don’t remember what (I’m sure she would remember; her memory was perfect). I was going on and on. She stopped me and said, “You’re not angry, you’re embarrassed.” That is one of the most brutal pieces of feedback I’ve ever received, and I think about it every time I’m angry at someone. I always need to check to see if I’m actually embarrassed instead.
Horror/Glory. The literature of embarrassment is thin, for what an important geopolitical force embarrassment is. As far as I’m concerned, there are two bards of embarrassment in contemporary American literature: Tim O’Brien and Curtis Sittenfeld.
O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is not really a novel; it’s a phantasmagoria about the Vietnam War. I didn’t read the whole book until I was studying for my comps, despite having read the first chapter of the book, also titled “The Things They Carried,” about twenty times in creative writing classes and even having taught it a couple times, too. That story is so popular to teach because is a “list story,” a chronicle of what each person in the platoon carried on their missions, but within the list it somehow, phantasmagorically, tells the story of the death of one of the men, Ted Lavender, the unrequited love between Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and Martha, an English major at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, and much, much more. Despite having read this story so many times, I never noticed this part of it, until I read the whole book:
They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
This moment is echoed later in the book, when O’Brien—no, the fictionalized/semi-fictionalized/real version of O’Brien that narrates some of it—canoes from Minnesota to Canada, trying to gin up the courage to dodge the draft. But “I couldn’t risk the embarrassment,” he writes—
Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with mortality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. …I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.
To be a bard of embarrassment, you have to write with gruesomeness and honesty. To “kill and maybe die,” is framed here as something passive—avoidance rather than activity. The whole book works like that, turning assumptions about war, memory, and reality into their opposites. Embarrassment is the pivot around which those opposites chase each other; it sets the world of the book in motion. It sets wars in motion, O’Brien knows. I think it sets humankind in motion.
Horror. Curtis Sittenfeld is the ideal person to have written Rodham, because Hillary Clinton’s public presentation is so wrapped up in embarrassment, from the cookie comment through last week’s advice that Democrats “go down fighting.” This book got pretty bad reviews, and I thought of not reading it, but I am a Curtis Sittenfeld completist; I just couldn’t help myself.
Andrea Long Chu has a withering review of Rodham in Jewish Currents (thank you Hilary Plum for telling me about it). The novel, as Chu points out, is boring.
This is a shame; if an author is just going to make things up, they might as well be interesting. Instead, the novel obeys what we might call the caterpillar effect: the principle that an apparently major change in the initial conditions of a complex system may, many iterations later, make almost no difference at all.
The keyword for me here is “obeys.” This isn’t a novel of manners, like Sittenfeld’s other books, it’s a novel of obedience. One of the ways it achieves obedience is to cut out almost all mention of politics. Sittenfeld’s Hillary says stuff like, “I just feel so focused on what I can do to improve the lives of everyday Americans through jobs and education and healthcare” and “So much is at stake in this election in terms of the economy, education, climate change…” This book doesn’t have the courage to get any more specific than that. It doesn’t have the courage to let Hillary be wrong about anything.
But in rightly dissing Rodham, Chu paints Sittenfeld’s oeuvre with too broad a brush:
it is an unpolitical book by an unpolitical author about—for all her ambition—an unpolitical person, one who is manifestly uninterested in justice beyond her own professional rewards.
Rodham sucks, definitely. It’s like Sittenfeld didn’t bother with it—even her beautiful sentence-making is absent here. But Sittenfeld is not an “unpolitical” author. Chu expands her critique of Rodham to cover American Wife, Sittenfeld’s masterly fictionalized portrait of Laura Bush.
“I love Laura Bush,” [Sittenfeld] wrote, too naïve to grasp that she was supposed to.
It’s easy—and cool—to dismiss Sittenfeld because it is embarrassing to love Laura Bush, and it is embarrassing to write fan fic about Hillary Clinton. But American Wife, like most of Sittenfeld’s writing, is not naive. And it is loving only in that it pays close attention, standing back to let Laura twist the knife herself, into herself. Sittenfeld’s Laura Bush reminds me of Errol Morris’s Robert MacNamara.
Sittenfeld is an excellent writer. Her first novel, Prep, deserves its own whole newsletter and more. She is as masterful a short story writer as Alice Munro; it’s just that Munro’s characters have lots of dignity, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s have absolutely none at all. The first story in her 2018 collection You Think It, I’ll Say It, titled “Gender Studies,” was published in The New Yorker right before the 2016 election. Everyone in the story is insufferable, yet sympathetic—even characters who are introduced and dispatched with in a single sentence. It is about a haughty liberal gender studies professor who has an embarrassing affair with a shuttle driver.
The last sentence of the story constitutes the professor’s obviously unsuccessful attempt to push the shuttle driver out of her consciousness: “Besides, he was a Trump supporter.”
This statement is overburdened; the professor needs it to mean that the man doesn’t matter to her, that she never met him and the affair never happened and he doesn’t exist anyway. This story is about “shame and desire,” to use a phrase from its final paragraph. It’s political.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, and You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld; The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
Unrecommended: Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld
There is an interesting expression in Spanish, "vergüenza ajena." It means embarrassment for another; it is not for oneself directly, mind you, but for another who is sooooo embarrassing, it embarrasses you. Very appropriate these days.