Candide for the Romcom Era

Ellie Martin-McKinsey, Turtle A

The Girl doesn’t have a name, or friends, or a direction in life; she’s never needed them. She follows directions from The Universe, which gives her missions, and she simply obeys. Her latest mission takes her to Illinois, where Nico, an exotic dancer running from his past, ignores any universal plan. But once there, The Universe stops communicating with The Girl. She finds herself stranded with a stranger who doesn’t understand her mission.

Debut novelist Ellie Martin-McKinsey has basically written a conventional romcom, but rather than two mismatched characters, her story features two common ways of seeing the modern world. The Girl believes in radical purpose, and spends her life pursuing a higher calling, to the point where she’s become a complete cypher, even to herself. Nico believes in total individualism, but being self-reliant hasn’t made him happy; quite the opposite, he lives with constant, bottled disappointment.

Both characters depend on their philosophies because, so far, they’ve worked. The Universe keeps providing The Girl with missions, and she constantly falls bass-ackward into the money, connections, and transportation necessary to reach each job. Rules and morals are provisional; she simply goes where she’s needed. She squishily avoids questions of whether The Universe is God, but her explanation matches Thomist definitions.

Nico, by contrast, eschews all connections to a larger plan. He walked away from controlling family, from the strictures of higher education, and from any moral guideposts he didn’t write for himself. The resulting life isn’t lucrative—he works two low-paying jobs for rent and groceries—but it’s entirely his own, and that’s what matters. If anyone talks about responsibilities, community, or any Higher Plan, he responds with simmering wrath.

Two characters, each equally confident in their own philosophy. Life has conspired to reassure them that their system works. Until plot contrivances push them together, forcing them to work through their incompatible beliefs. (Martin-McKinsey doesn’t pretend to conceal her authorial fingerprints; she’s having too much fun for that.) Suddenly they have to make compromises, listen to each other, and try to understand.

Ellie Martin-McKinsey

Again, the plot follows the basic signposts of romantic comedy. The meet-cute, the mismatched personalities, the learning curve, the crisis point. Martin-McKinsey takes a comfortable commercial narrative form, which she confidently expects most audiences already understand, and uses it to pitch two commonly held philosophies into conflict. It’s easy to imagine Voltaire or Sartre doing something similar, had they lived in our era of Hollywood excess.

It’s easy to imagine an inexperienced author reducing this premise to mawkish lectures; I probably would’ve. But Martin-McKinsey eschews name-dropping exposition; the characters don’t explain the story to one another. They’re too busy living by their philosophies, and amending them where needs must. And Martin-McKinsey herself clearly has too much fun letting these characters roll to bother inserting herself to sententiously ensure we understand her point.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, her characters start as Platonic ideals, confident in their philosophy because it works on paper. But both authors remind us that Platonic philosophy only works in a friction-free atmosphere, which, until now, the Universe has politely provided them. But their collision forces both to reevaluate everything they’ve previously considered settled. Nothing, Martin-McKinsey reminds us, is ever completely settled when other people are involved.

Cultural purists like me often pooh-pooh the repetitive romcom structure. Superficially, little seems at stake; in most circumstances we know how it will end for the characters. Indeed, though Martin-McKinsey slightly subverts our final expectations, it remains easy to imagine someone like Richard Curtis writing this for Hollywood. Snooty writing professors disparage romcoms as structurally allergic to surprise, innovation, or depth.

But I don’t make Voltaire comparisons lightly. Candide follows similarly commercial novelistic patterns popular during Voltaire’s time, guiding audiences to understand his point because they already understand the plot structure. Both Voltaire and Martin-McKinsey divert audience resistance to deep concepts by keeping their attention on a story that they already know and enjoy. Readers don’t like being told what to think, but we enjoy going on a journey with the characters.

Martin-McKinsey uses our familiarity with comfy Hollywood storytelling to guide us on a journey we probably wouldn’t take in more solemn classroom conditions. Like Candide, this novel is short, fast-paced, and driven by action and dialog, not exposition. Our characters don’t have a point, they live their point, and encourage us to see them in their living. And when they’re forced to change their minds, we already understand why. It’s deep and philosophical, yes, but it’s also just fun.