New Yorker Fiction Review #182: "The Prarie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld

(photo by Grant Cornett)

Review of a short story from the Feb. 13 & 20, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

If you want to make a story interesting, include a lesbian love affair that takes place between counselors at a summer camp...

I wish I could say my brain had evolved to a point where the first thing that I remembered about Curtis (f.) Sittenfeld's "The Prarie Wife" was not the sex scenes between Kirsten and Lucy -- which take place on hot, dusty couches of locked common areas at a summer camp, in the sweaty, lazy, tragic, waning days of August -- but I can't say that. And frankly, its my feeling that whatever provides an entry point (no pun intended) into a further understanding of a story's deeper message is fair game. After all, the Odyssey had one-eyed monsters and murderous singing enchantresses in it; Hamlet had a talking ghost. NEITHER of those famous stories had lesbian love affairs, however. Advantage Sittenfeld...except that the deeper meaning in this story ultimately remains slightly undercooked.

Even if you're focused on the "present day," non-sexual parts of the story that book-end the central flashback, the love affair at the center of "The Prarie Wife" still takes center stage; after all, it's the reason why the main character, Kirsten, is so obsessed with Lucy after all the years that have passed. Like a lot of memories, it still looms very large in Kirsten's mind and she has not dealt with it properly.

The actual mechanics of the plot Sittenfeld has conducted are pretty meta, contemporary, and frankly could be the makings of a great novel not just a short story. In brief, Lucy and Kirsten have an affair at summer camp in the mid-90s, crossing each other as they head in different directions on the spectrum of sexuality: Lucy is a "gold star" lesbian who will ultimately marry a man and start a folksy, down-home lifestyle brand very much based around her being a "normal" middle-of-the-road, and straight, middle-American woman...while Kirsten is a straight college student on her way toward a life in which she's married to a woman and raising two young boys.

The story essentially involves Kirsten working through her jealousy of Lucy's success and bitterness that is it -- seemingly -- based on a lie: if Lucy is actually a lesbian, then isn't her down-home lifestyle brand a bunch of b.s.? Well, not really. As it turns out Lucy reveals her own "secret" before Kirsten can drop a tip about it to a New York-based gossip rag, which she debates doing. Leaving Kirsten with no choice but to look at her jealousy and bitterness head-on for what it is: pain and regret about her relationship with Lucy that she's never dealt with because, until Lucy became a celebrity, she was able to bury.

In spite of the fact that my attention -- and I'd wager most people's -- is naturally drawn to the more prurient aspects of the story, I wish two things: a.) That Lucy had not revealed the secret on her own before Kirsten could act out, b.) that Sittenfeld had explored Kirsten's regret a bit more, because I feel like that's what's really at the heart of this story, not two college girls sweating on dusty couches on August afternoons. It seems like there was an opportunity for Sittenfeld to do more here but she just didn't quite get there. Maybe she got distracted by the lesbian sex, too?

Furthermore, I want to be pissed off at the way Sittenfeld reveals that Kirsten is married to a woman (her spouse is referred to merely as "Casey" for most of the story, until 3/4 of the way through when Sittenfeld finally uses the pronoun "she") but it actually worked and I literally said, "Whaaaat?!" out loud when I got to that part of the story.