Spoiler-Free Review

Romantic Comedy wasn’t for me. And to be honest, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this is the kind of book a person might write when they don’t want to admit they’re writing self-insert SNL fanfiction in which Luke Bryan falls in love with them.

What’s Romantic Comedy about?

Sally is a high-performing sketch show writer who laments the fact that average men often date supermodel women, but the reverse is rarely true. Enter singer-songwriter Noah Brewster.

I should’ve DNF’d it, but had too much to say not to review it.

My first and main complaint is that, despite its name, Romantic Comedy is not very romantic or comedic. In fact, it’s not a comedy at all. The cast work on a sketch show, so obviously there are jokes flying around (and only in the first third, really), but the plot is not a comedy. And the romance just…happened. I just never felt the chemistry between Sally and Noah. Mostly because the book spent so much time telling us how much Sally was into him that it forgot to show us.

Pacing? What pacing?

I couldn’t find a rhythm. The first 35 pages consisted of a fair amount of exposition (not entirely a bad thing at first, its brevity had a certain charm) and time was passing at a steady clip. Then bam, 15 pages dedicated entirely to one conversation. This kind of thing kept happening.

There were also lots of scenes that were just about Sally…being at work. Doing her job. Explaining her job to us via exposition. It was charming at first, as an obvious riff on SNL and very reminiscent of 30 Rock, but after a certain point I realized there really wasn’t any mounting tension or intrigue to carry us through these scenes anymore. I’m reading this book for the romance, not the play-by-play of a person working at a sketch show. But it was more the latter than the former. (The main character even teared up a little once while talking about loving her job…side eye).

It also didn’t help the pacing that there were 80 pages of emails smack in the middle. Add to that a forced subplot about a side character wanting to date a doctor (which I never cared about), and it was a recipe for skimming. Actually, this felt like a 30 page short story they expanded to 300 pages for no reason. To which they also added a slew of irrelevant side characters.

The self-insert of it all

It was in that one 15-page conversation where a distinct feeling started worming its way into my reading experience – that this might be a self-insert main character. There were punchy real-world political one-liners already up to that point, which would jolt me out of my reading experience. But then in this one conversation we got a block of text where Sally outlines a laundry list of her favorite musical artists, followed a few pages later by another block of text about her desire to eventually write “actually good romantic comedies.” I couldn’t help but think that the author was really just talking through her main character.

It felt like Sittenfeld set out to tell a story not about a unique character with a complete arc, but rather about a character modelled after herself so she could Make a Point(TM).

Should you read Romantic Comedy?

The honest truth is that this is a romcom written for people who think romcoms are silly, and so it forsakes all the hallmarks of the genre. Not in a trope subversion way, either — in a “I’m not like other romcoms” way. And because of that, it doesn’t know who its target audience is. It’s too dry for most romcom readers, and it doesn’t have enough meat on its bones for most litfic readers. Which is to say it’s boring on both counts.

Read this book if you’re more interested in the inner workings of a sketch show than any actual romance. And also if you don’t mind a book with no plot progression or character arcs.

Another note is that it’s only 3 chapters long. Not because it’s short; it’s 300 pages. It felt like being trapped in a never-ending deluge of exposition (so much telling instead of showing). And that’s another reason I suspect it was only ever meant to be a short story.