I really enjoyed this, as well as Rai’s insightful comments. To which I will add that I found this story to be funny, satirical, but more than that because it has a heart, especially in that last scene, with the hug from the middle-aged neighbor.

William, you mentioned two of the things that bugged me most about this story. The first is the sentence “It was 1998 and I was 25.” It’s a perfect example of telling rather than showing, but what makes it worse is how unnecessary it was. I had already figured out it was later twentieth century by the fact that the scholarship news came by snail mail and the amount of the award. Her age is also pretty clearly indicated by her being in grad school and comments she makes about the ages of others. To me that sentence was very clunky writing.
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The second is the use of the word “syntax”. Is it really possible that Sittenfeld and whoever edited this story for the magazine don’t know what the word “syntax” means? Because objecting to the word “fester” because of its meaning is not an issue of syntax. I considered that maybe the word is used wrong intentionally to indicate that the character isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, but that does not fit the rest of the story given that she wins the big award and goes on to be a very successful writer.
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Those might seem like nitpicky comments, and I would agree to some extent they are, but they are only a couple of examples of many times when I paused and thought “WTF? Really?” while reading the story. Even that bit about “you don’t get to say whether they’re writers” is silly. It would be fine if she were talking about how you can’t say someone isn’t a writer just because their work isn’t being published, but she makes the comment about people who have stopped writing. It comes off looking too self-congratulatory – as if being a “writer” is a magical kind of person you are whether you ever actually write or not.
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I could go on. The group hug was just odd and did not seem to serve any purpose (in the interview she says that is what the story started with, so I suppose it made the final cut just because it was there at the start, not because it fit). The relationship with the neighbour was weird and then just got sentimental. Anyway, I’ll stop there. Sittenfeld’s previous two stories for The New Yorker were worse, so this is a step forward. But it’s still not very good.

I wish I could better explain (to myself!) what it is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing that is often so unsatisfying. This story is a another perfect example of my problem with her writing. She’s very workman-like (workwoman-like?) so her stories are well-constructed which, for me, means the pace and interest level of the “plot” are sufficient to ensure I finish the story (which is why I’ve read 2 of her novels and 3 of her short stories in the NYer.) But I never end up caring even minimally about her characters, identifying with some aspect of them or their lives, or saying to myself “I know this person!” because they never come alive on the page in any meaningful way. (In fact all of her female protagonists are the same person, differentiated only by locale, family situation, profession.) Here, Sittenfeld gives Ruthie a sprinkle of insights and retrospective “deep” thoughts, that never seem jell into a character of any depth – rather they are just an accumulation of jargon – in this instance grad school jargon, writing program jargon, 25 year old female lifestyle jargon – a facsimile. (In other stories, suburban mom jargon.) To use an analogy, her characters are like people one comes across sometimes in a social setting – I don’t know them – they’re friendly, talkative to the point of going on and on, not on my wavelength tho they seem to think everything they say is mutually agreed upon by the company they find themselves with. So as a result they eventually start getting a little tedious. The difference between that person and Ruthie is that, in real life, one sometimes has the opportunity/option to get to know what lies beneath the persona. But in a short story the option to get to know and understand the character is either there on the page or it’s not. It’s never there (for me) in Sittenfeld’s writing. Of course I realize this must be the hardest task a writer faces, but’s at the heart of what makes a short story a gem.

David –

You first object to this:

“It was 1998 and I was 25.” It’s a perfect example of telling rather than showing, but what makes it worse is how unnecessary it was”.

I disagree. I don’t think Sittenfeld meant this as information. I think it was intended to give weight to the ensuing material and to emphasize context. It’s as though she was saying, “You have to understand that this happened many years ago when I was quite young.”

Next you say:

“The second is the use of the word “syntax”. Is it really possible that Sittenfeld and whoever edited this story for the magazine don’t know what the word “syntax” means?”

It seems unlikely, doesn’t it? So why might that misuse of the word be in there? It occurs in a self-mocking sentence, so perhaps she was making fun of her younger self’s pretensions to special knowledge.

Also:

“Even that bit about “you don’t get to say whether they’re writers” is silly. It would be fine if she were talking about how you can’t say someone isn’t a writer just because their work isn’t being published, but she makes the comment about people who have stopped writing. It comes off looking too self-congratulatory – as if being a “writer” is a magical kind of person you are whether you ever actually write or not.”

No, David, it’s not silly. It’s one thing for you to object to something from your broad literary and knowledge base; it’s quite another when you object to something from a lack of experience and a lack of understanding. In two weeks I am going to take an intensive one-week course called “Reading As A Writer”. As you might expect, the primary text is Francine Prose’s book of a similar name. The subtitle of Prose’s book is: “A guide for people who love books and those who want to write them.” I’ve done some short story writing, though I can’t say I have ever finished a satisfactory story. Certainly I wouldn’t call myself a writer. Yet I believe that I read from the viewpoint of someone who has tried to craft fiction. I don’t feel that I am being self-congratulatory, nor do I regard myself as a magical kind of person. I just believe that there is a particular way of reading that derives from having attempted to write.

David, I admire your broad acquaintance with literature. I often find your comments insightful and I learn things from reading them. Yet, sometimes you seem so jaundiced and harsh.

Diana –

I admire your sharing openly this meditative reflection on why you don’t like this story (or Sittenfeld’s other work) more. However, I don’t think we are supposed to identify with fictional characters. We may, but that’s not a criterion that I rate highly in evaluating a story.

You talk about how her characters seem similar. I don’t think that’s unique to Sittenfeld. I’m thinking of Alice Munro, how many of her stories are about either the young or the mature Alice Munro. I don’t think that’s avoidable. T.C. Boyle often writes about a 30-something grad student.

You also write:

“But in a short story the option to get to know and understand the character is either there on the page or it’s not. It’s never there (for me) in Sittenfeld’s writing.”

Personally, I don’t think we can get to know a character deeply in a short story. Obviously you feel differently. Can you give us a couple of examples?

William, I don’t want to fall into a pedantic rabbit hole on this, but you have missed the point here in a way that actually supports what I was saying. Let’s look again at exactly what happens in the story. When Ruth and Bhadveer meet, he mentions that only they and Grant (the misogynist filmmaker) have become successful. Then Ruth mentions Harold and Marcy, who are being published but with little success. Then we get this:
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“Think about it,” Bhadveer said. “Jeff’s not a writer. Dorothy’s not a writer. Your boy Doug’s not a writer. Aisha’s not a writer.”
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Clearly what he means by “not a writer” is someone who is not writing. He uses the phrase the same way anyone would about someone who has switched jobs. “I used to be a carpenter, but I’m not a carpenter anymore. Now I drive a bus.” But Ruth objects to this and says to us, “you don’t get to say whether they’re writers” Then she adds that some of them might be working on something we don’t know about. Fair enough. They might be writing and we don’t know, but that just means we can be wrong when we say “not a writer”, not that we are not allowed to define what counts as a writer. She adds, “some of them probably haven’t written fiction for years and might never again. But the way they inhabit the world, the way they observe it—of course they’re writers.” Really? Even if they only tried writing briefly and gave it up because they were terrible at it? Just because someone tried to be a writer once does not mean that they have some (dare I say it again) magical idea of how writers see and live in the world. Some people have no talent for writing and so they stop trying. Some don’t stop trying even though it’s always bad. Do those people all count as people who have this special and unique way of seeing and living in the world? Utter nonsense.
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Ruth clearly means “is a writer” as a phrase that means “has a special and unique way of living in and looking at the world”. So I guess a shitty writer who lacks this perspective, but persists in producing writing does not count in her books as a writer at all. This means someone who, to use your example, was a hopeless soccer player not just years ago, but who still plays pick-up games today and is just as hopelessly bad at it does not even count as a soccer player for her. That’s the self-congratulatory and pretentious part of it all. And it is made all the worse by her seeming to say that we can never tell if someone has this unique way of seeing and being, so we are never allowed to say “not a writer” about anyone. If someone who does not work as a writer and never has, and in fact has never even tried to write declares “I am a writer” she thinks we are not allowed to say “no you’re not.”
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She wants the phrase “is a writer” to say something about how people see and live in the world, not something about what they actually do (ie; writing). You are never allowed, according to her, to say that some other person lacks that quality. That’s just obnoxious.

William, the best case scenario is that Ruth is guilty of a non sequitur. Let us suppose you are right that people who once played soccer look at the world differently than people who have never played and people who were once carpenters look at the world in another different way and people who once wrote look in the world another different way – that everyone looks at the world in different ways based on what they have done in the past. If that’s all she’s saying then her objection to Bhadveer completely misses his point. He was merely talking about who among their peer group from school were still writing and how many of them had had success and how that compared to who had won Peaslees. None of that has anything to do with her response.
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But there still is that pesky claim that we are not allowed to say someone isn’t a writer. Imagine you meet a guy at a party and as you are talking about something he say, “Well, as a writer here’s how I see that.” He then goes on to explain his perspective. Some time later a woman who knows him well says to you, “actually, he only wrote bad poetry twenty years ago and has never even tried writing since, so he’s not really a writer,” would you say, “No. You don’t get to say who is a writer”? Or would you more likely think that the guy was a pretentious fool? I know my answer.

William, in response to your question, two stories/ characters jump immediately to mind. Marie in Clean, Cleaner Cleanest (I may not have done Sittenfeld a favor by reading the two recent stories back to back.) and Alice Munro’s Juliet in the beautiful trilogy of stories “Chance” “Soon” and “Silence” published in the NYer a while back (that admittedly runs to 80? pages, but still, not a novel.)

The techniques for revealing the characters’ depths are quite different in the two stories. Juliet’s daughter has purposely eliminated her daughter from her life and the mother has no idea why altho she posits many possible reasons. We know more about Juliet than she does about herself. She doesn’t seem to recognize the inner dynamic that connect her rejection of her own mother to her own daughters rejection. Though educated, she doesn’t have much insight about herself. There’s a beautiful passage (in I believe the second story) when she’s comes back to her mother’s house during her mom’s final illness. She finds some papers related to the Greek language/doctoral work which she loved but eventually abandoned to marry. “This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.” At this point in the story she isn’t estranged from her daughter. She is thinking about Greek and her work, but we, the reader have already seen it’s an operative dynamic in her life. Juliet never manages to understand her daughters silence. She instead chooses to resign herself. Nor does Juliet try to contact her but opts instead to learn to live with her silence in peace. But we are sad for her because we see it is a half life. In many small touches, Juliet is so real a character that we know her well enough to see, accept and understand her blind spots because this is who she is; because though we are not Juliet, we all have our own blind spots, ones that cause us pain we don’t understand, obvious to everyone but not to oneself. In an earlier comment I said “identify with” not really a good choice of words. This is closer to what I meant by that. But it’s unfair to compare Curtis Sittenfeld with Alice Munro regardless of whatever postion one takes on CS’s skill or lack thereof in creating a character. I find her characters, insights and dialogue (in particular!) very clichéd. She can construct a story that moves forward nicely though.

I’ve already talked about Marie in an earlier comments but wanted to note here that it’s the opposite situation/dynamic that occurs with Marie, but with the same result. Here it is we, the readers, who have the blind spot – almost an unconscious and culturally engendered bias to disregard Marie’s value. But I thought Alexie skillfully, with telling small details and incidents, and with neither hipness nor sentimentality opens our eyes to the richness and value of Marie’s life.

I realize this is a digressive response to your question, with no textual references to support my thesis so to speak, and I haven’t read the Munro stories recently. And mostly because in the final analysis I agree with Cicero who said “De gustibus non est disputandum” What we respond to, what resonates, is finally a matter of taste.

William – I look forward to hearing all about how your course went!