SHOW DON’T TELL: STORIES by Curtis Sittenfeld

All creative writing students are instructed early on with the same misguided advice to show, don’t tell in their writing. In other words, show me the character is crying without telling me the character is crying. Many times writers must tell. Tell what happened to a character in fifth grade so the reader will understand why she reacts a certain way as an adult. Sittenfeld does this expertly in each of the twelve stories in this collection. We’re told, with jabs of backstory at the beginning, the dilemma facing the narrator—usually a middle-aged woman coming to some realization about where they’ve been and how they’ve come to view their life in the present. The subject matter encapsulates jobs, homes, children, and relationships—all explored with satirical twists and Sittenfeld’s signature witty dialogue.

Favorite line(s): Her expression is hard to read as she says, “You know what I sometimes wish? I wish that either I liked you too much to eat sauerkraut around you or you liked me too much to find it gross that I do.”

He is both amused and mildly insulted, and it’s in this sprit that he says, “We don’t need to like each other. We love each other.” It occurs to him that he might have just uttered another true and perfect rejoinder like the one he made all those years ago to his cousin Nils, but when he glances at her for confirmation, re realized he didn’t.

“Oh, Rob.” If she doesn’t sound angry, she also doesn’t sound amused. Possibly but not definitely, she sounds sad. If her were a different kind of husband, a different kind of person he’d ask what’s inside those two words. That he doesn’t ask isn’t because he doesn’t care.

He says, “Come here.” But he is the one who walks toward her. He slides his arms around her ribs, below her armpits, pulls her body into his, and squeezes her torso. There are a few seconds where she is simply standing there, neither resisting nor responding. Abruptly, he realizes that they don’t really embrace much apart from sex. He’s pretty sure they used to, a long time ago.

Of course he cares. But he doesn’t think asking what she means by Oh, Rob will lead them to a better place. Engaging with a fleeting emotion doesn’t necessarily serve a purpose.

Several more seconds pass. The sink continues dripping. Finally, she raises both arms and he feels them tighten around him. She hugs him back.

PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers 

We read this one for our book club. The discussion went in various directions: climate change, AI, friendship, identity, and tech billionaires taking over the world. While it bends points of view (it got confusing toward the end of the novel), Playground essentially is about what happens when morals and desires intersect and then reconfigure to change the landscape of relationships. Powers’ contention is we are never really our authentic selves like we were in childhood and young adulthood. He shows this through the structure of man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. society, all while holding the magical world of the ocean’s inhabitants as  metaphor. The concept of our oceans as the next frontier for underwater developments for humankind, known as seasteading, has taken chapter and verse from this novel. Brilliant.  

Favorite line(s): I had done something unforgivable that I didn’t fully understand, and I was dead to him. But all the dead would live again, as in that curious book he had show me, lifetimes ago, in a castle by the shore of a lake that I once knew how to walk under. His sister would rise from her landing spot at the base of his apartment stairs. My father would uncrumple from the ruins of his 450. His mother’s heart would unburst. I would bring them all back—and Rafi, too. I just had to work, harder and longer hours. I just needed more posts, from another million users. I just needed techniques for keeping people logged in and telling us the stories of their lives. I just needed a machine that could read and explain those stories to me and tell me everything they meant. Put a pebble on the board. Then another. Watch the unfolding. I threw myself into Playground. It became my life. Every success was vindication and revenge. My virtual country evolved. Its code grew smarter. My employees became expert at creating a home more exciting than the one where most people lived. My algorithms learned to read and understand our users, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that my venture made I plowed back into further re-creations until here you are, the child of my games, able to absorb and play with and regenerate and realize all stories. And her we are, you and I, posed together on the threshold of raising all the dead.