The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘And Everything Will Be Glad To See You’
Somewhere about three-quarters of the way through Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, Romantic Comedy, I put the book back on the shelf. It wasn’t because I wasn’t enjoying it: it was, if anything, because I was enjoying it too much.
It seemed practically certain that Sittenfeld, a serious novelist, a grown-up’s novelist, was about to pull some kind of stunt. Our hero, the most famous rock star in the world, and our heroine, a TV writer, seemed to genuinely really like each other. They had been through things together. They had laughed together, cried together, even slept together. Which made me panic.
I’ve been burnt before by books that, in another life, might have qualified as romcoms. The great Nora Ephron-adjacent 1980s meet-cutes gave way to a Julia Roberts-fuelled 1990s, and then into a noughties era of not-yet-vintage chic before falling out of fashion entirely. We’ve had a good decade of broken hearts, endless trauma and books where nobody even kisses at all.
But the romcom is rising again. There are reported to be 36 new romance movies coming out this year; Netflix blesses us with a whole host of new Hallmark-style stories each winter; and the word from the London Book Fair, held this month, was that love was in the air. Readers, and by extension their publishers, are looking for connections of all kinds, the richer and more diverse the better. We want love; we want romance; we want happy endings.
Which is unsurprising. We have shifted towards love, towards joy, as the world grows ever bleaker (the pandemic, obviously, but also the planet, and Ukraine, and the cost of living, and the energy crisis, and on and on it goes). Art tends, perhaps, towards the emotional contrast: when the world seems hopeful, we go for dystopias; when the world seems bleak, we go for romance.
Consider the extraordinary success of Normal People — a literary novel by any stretch of the imagination, but what reader wasn’t waiting for Marianne and Connell to come to their senses? Sally Rooney brought yearning back to the mainstream. Her characters longed for each other; and in the darkest days of the pandemic it seemed that the whole world was watching the TV adaptation and longing too.
The author Kate Young, whose joyful fiction debut Experienced comes out next year, once told me that a good romcom (movie, book or TV) has precise beats — like a dance. The ideal and most satisfying moment for the two leads to meet each other is 12 per cent of the way through the story. Then there’s the first kiss, the first argument, the immovable obstacle and the unstoppable force, the Heath-Ledger-On-The-Bleachers moment before one last row and the final, beautiful mad dash-to-the-airport style gesture. The reader knows, in romance, what’s going to happen.
Except, of course, when they don’t. The thing about most writers is that (like cats) once we know what you want us to do, we’ll do anything to avoid doing it. Plus, isn’t there something a little gauche about a happy ending? Isn’t it a bit obvious, trite, maybe even clichéd? Maybe it starts with Tolstoy: if all happy families are alike, is all happiness alike too? Or: if every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, is every unhappiness then more worthy of unpacking than the alternative?
But things become trite because they are true, and sometimes we need reminding of what’s really there: what’s right in front of us, or what might be if we opened ourselves up to the possibility. Romcoms, whether that’s TV like Starstruck (recently recommissioned) or movies like Rye Lane, give us possibility. They give us magic.
Sittenfeld had hit every single one of the romcom beats; and that made me fear the worst. But I did finally finish Romantic Comedy. And, spoiler alert, all the right people kissed, and for a moment, the world felt brighter.