Austinist Review: The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

The follow up to her surprise smash, Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld's The Man of My Dreams (TMoMD), is a similar meditation on awkwardness that tracks its protagonist, Hannah Gavener, from the trauma of her parents' divorce at age 14 to her realistic, and not too overdue, epiphany at age 28. Sittenfeld shows that it's not just parents that don't understand, as Will Smith posited in 1988, but sisters, cousins, boys, and protagonists, too.

TMoMD succinctly presents the complex of a dysfunctional American family and one girl's quest to secure an ideal relationship. Hannah's circumstances are coolly related through third-person narration. The narrative voice establishes a symmetry between reader and writer that is entertaining and compelling as it presents both Hannah's freshman neuroses and ruminations of the mundane with ease:

She imagines the workingmen and-women of Boston leaving their offices, pulling out of parking garages or hopping on the T. The people in their twenties call their friends and plan to meet at bars, and the families in the suburbs make spaghetti and rent movies (it is the families she's more jealous of), and the weekend opens up to them, the relief of empty hours. They will sleep late, wash their cars, pay bills, whatever the things are that people do. Sometimes on Fridays Hannah takes cough medicine so she can fall asleep even earlier than usual, once as early as five-thirty in the afternoon. This is probably not the best idea, but it's only cough medicine, not really sleeping pills.

After returning from a party, and not hooking up, she concludes her fate is to one day be alone, old, and "as rare as a coelacanth [a fish once thought to be extinct] . . . lobe-finned and blue-scaled and soundless gliding alone through dark water." Ultimately it's Hannah's perception of herself that she must surmount.

TMoMD is a subtle bildungsroman, which, in addition to being an apt designation, is the most fun sounding literary term ever. Hannah's growth is not as plain as the prose would lead readers to believe. She is surrounded by the character traits of others that serve as reactive forces: her incongruous father's asshole-ism; her contemporary aged cousin Fig's sluttiness; her sister Allison's perfect façade; her three boyfriends (Mike, Oliver, and Henry) and their "personality templates."

Like reality, there are unpleasant facts that persist despite a seemingly ordinary plot, and nothing can simply be taken at face value. The light, inviting tone of the narrator is like a subdued tabloid expose of an average family. There's dirt, tons of it, lying underneath the plot and it's what keeps the pages turning rapidly. It's a trivial metaphor for a book that is ultimately about self-ownership, but Sittenfeld is a savvy writer and she writes entertaining prose. The world that she creates is one of inhabitable, believable settings and painfully spot-on social moments (our favorite is when a 9-year-old Hannah endures her father's deconstruction of the "rubber balls and liquor" joke).

Curtis Sittenfeld is probably one of the best stylists writing in contemporary fiction. She possesses a wit that brings meaning to the ordinary and makes it worth noticing. Many critics have accused TMoMD of lacking in innovation, but it features so many of the strengths that made Prep amazing and, standing on its own and not as a "sophomore effort," it is a good novel. Although the ending is contrary to what you'd expect and the form it takes is a little odd, The Man of My Dreams is a satisfying read and a highly recommended companion for any summer excursion.

The Man of My Dreams
by Curtis Sittenfeld
(Random House, $22.95)

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