Someday Her Prince Will Come
In her first book since "Prep," Curtis Sittenfeld writes about a young woman searching for Mr. Right.
THE MAN OF MY DREAMS
A Novel
  (Jacket Photograph © Rick Schwab Limoges Porcelain Box Courtesy Of La Boutique De La Porcelaine De Limoges) |
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House. 272 pp. $22.95
Curtis Sittenfeld had the kind of success with her first novel that only a few young writers enjoy in any given decade. Prep , published in 2005, earned widespread critical raves, generated enormous publicity for its author and spent weeks on the bestseller list. Set at a New England boarding school, Prep stood out among the annual crop of coming-of-age novels with strong characters, vivid details of the emotional swoops of adolescence and a wonderful lack of stylistic gimmickry and pretension. If the novel felt over-stuffed in places, it had a cumulative power that was memorable and moving, and made Sittenfeld a writer to watch out for.
Producing a follow-up to such a major hit can't be easy. On one side are die-hard fans and eager editors clamoring for "Prep II," and, on the other, are critics sharpening their knives in anticipation of a sophomore slump. Curtis Sittenfeld has dispatched the second-book obligation with admirable speed -- only 16 months -- and the result is likely to disappoint both sides just a little. The Man of My Dreams is intelligent and insightful, a leaner and more rapidly paced novel than Prep. Even though it proves to be less powerful and distinctive than her first book, it offers more evidence that Sittenfeld is a clear thinker, a canny observer and a solid, graceful stylist.
The novel opens in June of 1991 when Hannah Gavener is 14 years old. Hannah is spending the summer at the Pittsburgh house of her hippie-ish aunt because, in a fit of pique, her father exiled his wife and two daughters from their Philadelphia home. To call her father moody is an understatement. "He's the weather system they live with, and all of their behavior, whenever he is around, hinges on his mood. . . . To complain or resist would be as useless as complaining about or resisting a tornado."
Hannah distracts herself from this emotional upheaval by focusing on the love lives of celebrities and flirting with a tattooed boy in the park. She's edging toward the realization that her parents are divorcing and beginning to build up the defenses that will later allow her to believe that growing up in an unstable household has its benefits: "Crises, when they occur, do not catch you off guard."
The summer of exile does, however, take its toll, and for the next 15 years -- and more than 200 pages -- Hannah attempts to come to terms with her difficult father, alternately seeking his approval and rejecting him before he rejects her again. This is the important background music to the search for love and the ensuing boyfriend problems that are at the emotional and dramatic forefront of the book.
Chief among the boyfriend problems is Henry. Hannah meets him when she's an undergraduate at Tufts -- a school rendered with disappointingly little specificity -- and is immediately smitten. The maybe-ex of her beautiful and casually promiscuous cousin Fig, Henry is a tall, handsome guy with the sort of vaguely attentive, easily misconstrued gaze that can string a person along for years. He's "exactly the image of what you think a boyfriend should be when you are nine or ten years old." More compelling still, and more emotionally fraught, is Hannah's suspicion that "only some girls grow up to get boys like this," and that she's probably not one of them.
A series of men come and go. Some are intimidated by Hannah's lack of sexual experience -- "Are you religious?" asks one suitor, trying to understand why she's still a virgin at 21. The most attractive men are unavailable, and the most available turn out to be the types "who will never say a surprising thing." None can compete with Hannah's distracting belief that Henry is the man of her dreams. It takes an act of humiliating foolishness -- and lots of psychotherapy -- for her to move in a direction that hints at a promising future.
Sittenfeld writes in crisp, vigorous prose that frequently rises to eloquence. She's especially good at describing what it feels like to be the outsider in a group. Hannah steps into a car and "is bombarded with music and cigarette smoke and the creamy, perfumed smell of girls who take better care of themselves than she does." Out of jealousy, Hannah intentionally provokes her more appealing and sought after sister, and then "sits there in the hideous, quiet aftermath of her own hostility."
Here, as in Prep , Sittenfeld refuses to romanticize her main character. It's a bold and admirable choice for any writer, but it's a risky one. Hannah's fear of intimacy and fixation on Henry feel real, but her resulting behavior -- cold and frequently abrasive -- makes her hard to like. Her outsider status gives her a beautifully described sensitivity to the gestures and inflections of herself and others, but she lacks a sense of humor when it comes to her own flaws and foibles.
The book's final chapter is a 24-page letter Hannah writes to her shrink, cataloguing the events of two years of her life. In it, the reader is given the emotionally climactic moments -- the resolution of the Henry situation, for example -- in shorthand, rather than fully developed scenes. It almost feels as if Sittenfeld grew weary of Hannah and wanted to move on. This race to the finish struck me as an unconvincing way to wrap things up, a misstep, but not one serious enough to diminish my enthusiasm for Sittenfeld's talent or my eagerness for more. ·
Stephen McCauley is the author of five novels, most recently, "Alternatives to Sex."
