For Saturday Night Live Fans
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*****
I really enjoyed this novel! It is about a woman, Sally Milz, who is a comedy writer for a show called The Night Owls, TNO, that is closely patterned after Saturday Night Live. Curtis Sittenfeld pulls off two feats in the book that make me really like the story and admire her as a writer. More about that in a minute…
The book opens with a prologue in which Sally becomes enraged when she wakes up to the news on social media that her office mate, Danny Horst, is dating Annabel Lily. As she tells us, “Annabel Lily [is] a gorgeous, talented, world-famous movie star, and Danny [is] a schlub. He [isn’t] a bad guy, and he, too, [is] talented. But for Christ’s sake, he [is] a TV writer, a comedy writer – he [is] a male version of [Sally].”
Sally tells us that this is the third time a “bona fide celebrity and a TNO staffer who’d met on the show” have become a couple. What is galling to Sally is the fact that the celebrity is always a woman and the staffer is always a man. She firmly believes that a romance would never occur the other way around, “that a gorgeous male celebrity would never fall in love with an ordinary, dorky, unkempt woman. Never. No matter how clever she was.”
All of that takes place in the prologue.
To deal with her anger in this situation, Sally turns to comedy. She writes a sketch called, The Danny Horst Rule, which she promotes at the Monday morning pitch meeting for the upcoming show. Noah Brewster is the extremely handsome celebrity for the week. He is a fairly unusual guest in that he will be both the host and the week’s musical guest. Like Sally, Noah is thirty-six. He has been famous for more than fifteen years. He has sold more than twenty million albums.
The first section of the book takes the reader through a typical – and very frenetic – week behind the scenes at the show. We see pitch meetings, all-night writing sessions, the submission of sketches, a table reading of the sketches, and we cheer when we see which sketches make it into the preliminary lineup of the show. When we get to the day of the show, we also see a 1 PM run-through, an 8 PM dress rehearsal before a live audience, and an 11:30 live show before a new audience. The first after-party occurs at 1:30 AM, with others to follow.
With this first section of the book, readers see Sittenfeld’s first magical feat – she writes humorously about being a comedy writer. As it is said, if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny. But she explains a lot about jokes and it is funny. I would think it daunting to write the behind the scenes workings of a SNL-type show. Sittenfeld pulls it off beautifully.
To get to her second magic act, we need to get back to the plot. As readers may guess from the story’s set up, during their week of togetherness, Noah and Sally are about to fall for each other.
As you may guess, Sally will be very skeptical of such a relationship working out. To tell you the truth, I was too! I remember being charmed by the movie, Pretty Woman, but I was very certain that Richard Gere’s character and Julia Roberts’ character didn’t stand a chance of staying together in the long run. Thus, the other amazing thing Curtis Sittenfeld does in this book is that she not only makes a romance between Sally and Noah believable, she finds a way to show us that a long-term relationship is in the cards.
It’s a Romantic Comedy with a believable and happy ending. I am sure you will want to see how Curtis Sittenfeld pulls it all off! Read it…today!
*****
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