Romantic Comedy

In Chapter 2, Sittenfeld turns from Sally’s first-person point of view to a third-person perspective, using the rhetorical tool of emails between Noah and Sally to reveal their respective perceptions of each other and the world. With this structural transition, Sittenfeld gives deeper insight into Noah’s character on his own terms, whereas in Chapter 1, he was described purely from Sally’s perspective. With this additional space for his own narrative voice, Noah is revealed to be a character who is kind and vulnerable and who struggles with his own insecurities. Despite his fame and wealth, Noah experiences deep isolation, emphasizing the pressure of Celebrity and Its Impact on the Individual. He finds human connection difficult because most people only want to know the public persona of Noah. Proximity to Noah ascribes social power and influence to anyone who dates him or befriends him, so he is necessarily cautious in his love life. Through his emails, both the reader and Sally discover that Noah has a depth to him that contrasts with the superficial celebrity Sally originally assumed he was. Noah is a complex character, as is Sally. By sharing both perspectives in Chapter 2, Sittenfeld fulfills a classic romantic-comedy trope of in which the male lead defies the preconceived assumptions of the female protagonist and proves himself to be special, unique, and worthy of her attention. In this case, Noah does so, not through demonstrations of strength or dominance but via vulnerability and honest communication, allowing Sittenfeld to frame the trope through a feminist lens.

Both Sally and Noah experience isolation and a tendency to distrust. Both have built their own armor to keep others at a distance—Noah to guard himself from the depersonalization and exploitation of his celebrity status, and Sally to arm herself against a workplace and a dating landscape that is often hostile to her as a woman. Noah has a tense relationship with his parents, who are conservative and never supported his career even with all his success. Sally never really knew her father, and her mother’s death left her fully alone in the world. Although they each have support structures (Noah finds deep family connection with his sister, while Sally has her beloved stepfather, Jerry), it’s this very isolation and tendency to distrust that forms their common ground and bonds them. Sharing their pasts and present anxieties in their emails allows them to experience vulnerability, a rarity in both their lives.

Importantly, Noah and Sally find this vulnerability in a virtual space, which preserves a sense of safety for them. They’re sharing with and caring for one another, but they can cease communication at any time. What’s more, they can edit, revise, and review their conversations, deepening their ability to connect and share their words, emotions, and vulnerabilities. The email exchange between Sally and Noah evokes the classical motif of love letters, but instead of handwritten epistles, their emails give the motif a modern twist. In Sittenfeld’s contemporary world, online dating has largely replaced the “meet-cute” trope of the romantic comedy, in which two future lovers run into one another in the real world in random and poetic ways. Online dating has been successful in creating couples, and people have become more comfortable with the idea that they can portray the person they want to be to their future dating partners. What’s more, online dating offers a wide variety of choice. But online dating can also be problematic because people can be a certain constructed version of themselves online, potentially misleading their dating partner about who they are in real life. But virtual connection has become a necessity in our technology-driven world. What’s more, Noah and Sally reconnect online during the height of the COVID-19, when people were forbidden from seeing one another in person. Thus, the email exchange becomes a necessary rhetorical tool, reflecting the novel’s contemporary reality.

In Chapter 2, Sally’s arc progresses in tandem with her relationship with Noah. As she becomes more vulnerable and honest with Noah, she’s able to find more clarity about her dissatisfaction with her job. As she gets older, new writers enter the TNO workspace with a younger perspective and social norms that didn’t exist for Sally when she was younger. Sally realizes that internalizing the gender norms of her youth has made her resentful and stuck, but the younger writers at TNO don’t subscribe to those norms. For them, identification with gender stereotypes is a choice, not a given necessity, which allows Sally to rethink her own relationship to internalized sexism and genderism. While prejudice based on gender is real, Sally learns that her own criticism of that prejudice is partly based on her internalization of it. The younger writers also help Sally understand the generation gap regarding the value of privacy. Noah is inherently private because his job forces him to be so public with his image. Sally is private because she was raised to understand the private self as separate from the public self. Social media has made younger generations more public about their private selves, dissolving the boundary between private and public. This is a realization that Sally struggles with because she can’t help but want to keep certain vulnerabilities to herself. Noah’s reality of being constantly overanalyzed by the public is frightening to Sally, who doesn’t want to deal with the judgment of the world around her. But the private vulnerability they share together allows Sally to feel protected within their relationship rather than exposed by it.

Sittenfeld’s structural use of Noah and Sally’s email correspondence builds tension as well as anticipation for the lovers’ eventual in-person reunion. Noah and Sally develop intimate connections through email, which accelerates their ability to feel comfortable being vulnerable but also creates a kind of protective bubble that they will inevitably have to leave. The emails are intimate enough to develop a deep friendship, but they are distanced enough to create certain mystery around the nature of that friendship. Does Noah want something romantic out of these email exchanges? Can Sally let her guard down enough to be up-front with her feelings for Noah? These questions develop romantic tension and anticipation a complex, conflicted romantic relationship that will develop when they are finally outside the bubble of their emails. Chapter 2 is the key midnovel transition in which Noah and Sally can start making decisions that will bring them closer together.