Amidst the ambition and scale of the other books at the top of this list, Romantic Comedy is an outlier. For it does what it says on the tin, no more, no less. Yet this is the most delightful, most funny, most sexy book on my whole list. This is the book I gave to people more than any other last year, safe in the knowledge that they would love it.
Sittenfeld is a writer of substance, famous for her weightier books: a reimagination of the life of Hilary Clinton had she never married Bill, or a peer into the mind of Laura Bush. But in Romantic Comedy she turns her humour and intellect to this most maligned of genres and plays it utterly straight. This is not an intellectual subversion of romcoms: it is an exquisitely current example of one, complete with (spoiler), happy ending.
The novel is set behind the scenes at a thinly-fictionalised version of Saturday Night Live, the live late-night comedy sketch show fronted by different celebrities each week. Writer Sally is sick of her gawky male colleagues shacking up with gorgeous celebrities; a dynamic, she feels, unlikely to play out were the genders reversed. But when pop star Noah Brewster turns up to prepare for his week of hosting, the signals she’s getting suggest she might need to think again.
As someone obsessed with TV and film production, I couldn’t get enough the behind-the-scenes show-prep that the novel presents to us, taking up a good half of the novel, and by the time that finishes I was so captured by the main relationship that I ate up a long chunk of emails between the characters before they’re finally brought together. I feel I need to edit my earlier review of the Skeleton Key, because I now remember that this was actually the most addictive novel I read last year, and it wasn’t even a thriller. There’s never any doubt what will happen, and still you can’t stop reading! If that isn’t a mark of success, I don’t know what is.
Come all ye tired, ye cynical, ye battered. This is romance with humour and brains; comedy without bitterness. Sittenfeld gives the people what they want.
Room of Joy 