Show Don’t Tell is a slyly ironic title for the latest story collection by Curtis Sittenfeld, a writer who luxuriates in the telling. We speak of a writer’s “voice” – Sittenfeld’s is the kind you could pick out from the opposite end of a noisy, overcrowded room. (She sounded fully formed from the first line of her superb debut novel, Prep: “I think that everything, or at least the part of everything that happened to me, started with the Roman architecture mix-up.”)
There is an oral quality to her work: Sittenfeld’s narrators and principal characters tell the reader directly how they feel and give voice to their inner monologues. The narrative may be interrupted by chatty emails or text exchanges. Characters are self-conscious about whether or how to “tell” their stories, or which words to choose when they speak. “Is there an infinite amount to share, or does a sentence or two suffice?” a character thinks in Show Don’t Tell. “I guess it depends who you’re telling the story to.” Another begins “composing in my head a new email to my landlord. I would, I decided, use the word ‘carcinogenic’”.
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