Curtis “I’m A Girl!” Sittenfeld gets reviewed by Daniel Asa Rose in the Observer. Her novel, which I’ve been looking forward to, is called Prep. As Sarah noted, the review is odd. Reading the first few grafs I kept thinking, “Conflate the author with her subject matter much?” (Yeah, in my head I talk like a Wisconsin mall chick cracking her gum in the food court.)
It was startling then when Rose stopped his review midway through to address just that conflation (I give some lead-in for context):
All the better, then, when sex of a sort arrives and is subjected to the same rigorous examination as everything else. Her first kiss “was harder work than I had imagined, and less immediately pleasing. In fact, it felt intriguing more than enjoyable—the shifting, overlapping wet and dry parts of our mouths and faces, the mild sourness of his mouth … and also the way it was hard not to be conscious of the moment as it happened, not to want to pause and acknowledge it, even if only by laughing. I didn’t find kissing funny, but it didn’t seem that serious, either, not as serious as we were acting like it was.”
Fast-forward to a blowjob. (Well, she does.) Surely Lee isn’t the first preppie to suggest that the discomfort of giving one confers “a sort of nobility—a kinship with all the girls who’d done this before.” But she may be the first to admit to “an affection for myself for being willing to do it.” It’s one of the reasons we come to be so fond of Lee and, by extension, Ms. Sittenfeld.
(Have I been getting the two mixed up? Blame the publisher, who made the questionable decision to send out press materials that feature photos of Ms. Sittenfeld’s real-life Groton School junior class, and even of her heartthrob—presumably the recipient of her oral largesse.)
I’m entranced and horrified by imagining this press kit. On the one hand, it seems absurd to write a novel and then have one’s press kit provide a memoir-type addendum. And not even a memoir so much as an archive of documents verifying the author’s credentials. (Albeit one useful to future biographers whose task of connecting characters to their real-life counterparts will be made that much simpler.)
On the other, doesn’t this make a press kit, like, 1,000 times more interesting? Screw suggested interview topics with the author and reading group questions. Blah blah blah. I propose that from now on all authors — regardless of their subject matter — be asked to provide their publishing house’s marketing team with photos of everyone they blew in high school.
Even better if you don’t have a picture of the guy from back then and are forced to track him down in his driveway as, middle-aged, receding and just barely remembering your name, he loads up the kids for school. “Hi, remember me? I’m an author now and I’ve written a thinly veiled account of giving you a blow job by the tennis courts after school. … Yeah, I was the one with the braces with all those little hooks for rubber bands. Sorry about that. It must have been rough. … Anyway, my marketing team has asked that I get your photo for my press kit. Say ‘cheese!’”
It seems Mr. Rose has a one-track mind. In his review of Samantha Hunt’s The Seas he’s got blow jobs on the brain right from the first paragraph. Ugh.
“A new aphorism for the over-30 set: Don’t trust anyone who claims to be objective about experimental fiction. Subjectivity is part and parcel of the experience, and quite gloriously so, it seems to me. I cheerfully admit that a lot of what passes for experimentalism leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the leftover tang of my undergraduate tutelage at the hands of a famously provocative avant-gardist who was quoted, back in the day, on the first page of The New York Times Book Review claiming that “plot and character are the enemies of fiction.” Heady stuff to the confused and impressionable 20-year-old under his wing, especially when head was more or less what the great man was doggedly trying to solicit from my girlfriend.”
Here’s the link: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ICQ/is_2004_Nov_8/ai_n6338604
Comment by Liz Younger — 1/12/2005 @ 11:55 am
Yeah, that’s some pretty icky figurative language. Poor Samantha Hunt. I wouldn’t want that shit in a review of my book.
Comment by CAAF — 1/12/2005 @ 11:59 am
Never has such a positive review left me so disinclined to read a book.
However, I’m much more intrigued by your use of the phrase, “blowing off,” CAAF. In my neck of the woods, “blowing off” always meant “failing to attend” (“I’m blowing off seventh-period social studies”), sometimes with malice (“I waited for half an hour at Blimpie’s, but bitch blew me off”). The oral sex infinitive was always just “to blow.” Anyway. Can you tell I’m avoiding work? Maybe Lynne Truss wants to weigh in…
Comment by Jimmy Beck — 1/12/2005 @ 12:10 pm
Bloody hell, that *really* puts a new spin on “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”…
Comment by Sarah — 1/12/2005 @ 12:17 pm
Jimmy, I’m always happy to spend a morning talking about blow jobs. I know the “blowing off” sense you mean, and I’m not sure if the “blowing off” (in the sense of b.j.s) my friends and I used was just us, so I changed the post. Standard Blowjob English. I always liked “blowing off” as it sounded concluded somehow but …
Regarding the book: I’m still looking forward to reading it, and given what Liz points out, I’m not sure about Rose as a reviewer (though I do agree that the press kit is questionable — but whatever it takes to sell books, eh?). Did you read Sittenfeld’s story from a few year’s back in the Mississippi Review? If you haven’t, Sarah’s got a link in her post today.
Comment by CAAF — 1/12/2005 @ 12:20 pm
Ohmigod, Sarah! That’s hilarious.
Comment by CAAF — 1/12/2005 @ 12:21 pm
Man, I’m going to have to learn to look at those press kits more closely. I don’t remember any prep school photos AT ALL.
Comment by Ron — 1/12/2005 @ 4:41 pm