Reading 2024 - The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I admire Curtis Sittenfeld very much. I have not read her imagined tales of Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton and I probably won't, as I hate fiction into which real figures intrude (the big flaw of War and Peace, for me, is the appearance of Napoleon as a character within its pages).

What I have read by Sittenfeld is her novel Eligible,  an updating of Pride and Prejudice, which I really enjoyed - even couldn't put down, to be truthful. Purists hate that book, but I have always found Jane Austen unbearably waspish - never allowing a reader to intuit, always insisting on explaining who is absurd or irritating or silly - so anything written as a pastiche of her is not going to outrage me. Instead, I found Eligible clever and entertaining, and was amused by Sittenfeld's updating of some of the original's social dilemmas. I have also read several short stories by Sittenfeld and every one of them was both a pleasure to read and full of insight. Therefore, I was very happy to start 2024 with a novel by her

The Man of My Dreams tells the story of Hannah, who at the beginning of the novel is 14 or 15 and staying with her father's sister, as her family have been driven from their home by her father's temper. The novel follows the life of this lonely girl as she grows up, with little help or care from selfish parents, in a society that gives her the message that the most important thing for a young female is being able to attract young men and go to bed with them. 

Hannah does not fit the template of attractiveness necessary for this - or at least she believes she does not. She is also not at all sexually adventurous. She feels as if she is a misfit, although she is actually both wise and normal and probably far from alone, if only her contemporaries would be honest. 

I find Sittenfeld's writing so absorbing that I happily followed Hannah through almost 300 pages of not really getting what she has been taught to want and slowly learning that perhaps what she has been taught is wrong. I don't know how Sittenfeld does it but for me at least she is simply never boring. Perhaps one element of her charm is her truthfulness. An example of this is her description of teenage Hannah's reaction to being accosted by an older male stranger in the park. Instead of the simplicity of me-too outrage, Sittenfeld explains that Hannah felt "simultaneously alarmed, insulted and flattered."

I suppose I should register the suspicion that The Man of My Dreams might be of no interest to most male readers, chronicling as it does the coming of age of a young female. Although would anyone by the same token argue that Tom Jones would be of no interest to female readers?