American Wife Book Review

My book club has just left the house, and although the table is still full of half-drunk wine glasses, I'm going to procrastinate cleaning up to write up my thoughts about Curtis Sittenfeld's latest novel, American Wife, a fictionalized account of Laura Bush's life.

The world is busy celebrating the historic, paradigm-shifting election of Barak Obama. All eyes are on his young family as they prepare to move in to the White House. But even though we're all eager to turn to the future and to work to get to a better economic situation, American Wife is still a very entertaining portrait of the current administration.

Sittenfeld transparently fictionalizes Laura Bush's life from her elementary school years to the middle of Bush's second term. Sittenfeld renames everyone in the novel and changes key geographic and historic details. The Bush's are the Blackwells, Laura is Alice, George W. is Charlie, George Sr. is Harold, and Barbara is Priscilla. Each section of the book is based on one major true event, but other parts of the story have been fictionalized. Sitttenfeld reveals some scandalous parts of "Alice Blackwell's" past: an abortion, a lesbian grandmother, and a car accident in which she killed her high school boyfriend. Only the accident is documented as true. Alice Blackwell never ceases being a liberal, even after "Charlie's" election. Sittenfeld's most shocking assertion is that Alice never voted for her husband and was not in support of his policies, including continuing the Iraq War.

Some of the most entertaining parts of the book that place on the rustic Blackwell family compound. This is where the family comes together every summer to share one temperamental bathroom and where the family dynamics are truly in play. Priscilla Blackwell, aka Barbara Bush, is painted as a dragon of a matriarch who leads her boys in long nights of hard social drinking. Her boys call her "Maj" in an open acknowledgement of her iron fist. George Bush Sr., Harold Blackwell in the novel, receives a much kinder characterization. Priscilla Blackwell is calculating, formidable, and casually racist. Here is Alice Blackwell's description of her first meeting with her future mother in law, "She had not yet glanced in my direction, and she reached out and set her fingers under Charlie's chin - I observed the strange fact of Charlie and his mother not embracing - and after her eyes had roamed over his face, she said in a warm tone, 'that haircut makes you look like a Jew.' Without hesitation - sincerely it seemed - Charlie laughed."

I enjoyed the novel up until the end when Alice Blackwell goes into overdrive to make her major argument: that she should not be held responsible for her husband's mistakes. She says, "During the periods when I've been the most frustrated by our lives, or by what is happening in this country, I've looked outside at the cars and pedestrians our motorcades pass, and I've thought, All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power. At other times, I have felt both a sense of regret for deceiving him and an oppressive awareness of my complicity in his elections." This is the point where I really struggled with Alice Blackwell's character. She was in a position of such public scrutiny, any sign of disagreement would have had a huge impact in favor of her liberal beliefs. By remaining mute to her beliefs, she betrayed herself. I understood the character that Sittenfeld was portraying, but did not believe her to be as liberal as she made her out to be because she chose to stay silent all of these years.

I recommend American Wife. It is a very compelling read that will leave you with some tough questions about how far the role of public wives should go, a particularly relevant topic after all the drama we witnessed during the election.