Humanity and Humiliatoin

 

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Help Yourself, hilarious and insightful new collection of three short stories, illuminates human experience, combines a potent blend of biting truths, entertainment  and upends our assumption about race, class, envy, and disappointment, gender and celebrity.

 Suburban friends fall out after a racist encounter at a birthday party is caught on video and posted on Facebook, an illustrious Manhattan film crew are victims of their own snobbery when they underestimate a  pre-school teacher from the Mid-West, and a group of young writers fight about love and narrative style as they compete for a prestigious bursary.

“White Women Lol”, one of the topical stories dealing with Jill , who spots a table of five black people  at her friend’s party and assuming they are in the wrong place, tries to get them to leave. A Covet recording of the encounter was posted in Facebook, which goes viral sending shockwaves to through her friendship group and triggers a variety on online reactions “a GIF of a fair haired white man blinking  (posted by a blackman)  and another GIF of a cartoon rat shaking his finger in disapproval (posted by a black woman) and another GIF of a baby spitting out what looked like pureed peas in abject disgust (posted by a white woman).”

Jill become obsessed with finding  the lost dog of Vanessa, a local black celebrity and acquaintance, in a seeming effort to restore her reputation.

Sittenfeld plays with  pity and judgement: can Jill do the work that is necessary to understand her prejudices? Can we?

Sittenfeld’s novels revolve around how quickly and how accurately we judge ourselves and others.

In “Creative Differences” a crew of documentary makers  from LA and  New York, fly into Wichita and proceed to look around disdain. It’s the local photographer they are there to film who really knows herself best.

 She turns down a huge career opportunity when she realises it is essentially an  commercial for toothpaste. The producer fails to understand where her “bizarrely pure uncompetitive confidence  comes from, his own judgement has been so eroded. Sittenfeld’s ability to expose our folibles, regrets and prejudices is immaculate.

Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld, Doubleday £8.99,  96 pages.