American Wife

I read American Wife for two reasons: Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a book I happened upon called Prep that I was surprised to find myself liking, and the Inauguration was about to happen. I also wanted something with some emotional and acute observational depth, both things Prep had an inordinate degree of, and I wanted something that read easily.

American Wife is about Laura Bush, but not really. It's more of an autobiography of someone I doubt Sittenfeld has ever met, accompanied with a vast artistic license. While most things in this semi-fictional retelling of the Bushes lives actually happened, Sittenfeld twists things subtly enough to make them feel fresh and real. American Wife has a lot of good things going on for it, but it seems massively uneven, and quite frequently lacks a center of gravity to keep it from becoming more than a spruced-up rehash of a story we're already mostly familiar with.

While her other book Prep has an incredibly likable, three-dimensional protagonist, Sittenfeld possesses a weakness for surrounding her central characters with very flimsy secondary characters. In American Wife, the stand-in for Laura Bush, Lindy Blackwell, doesn't have the element of realness and likability to hold the some five-hundred pages together, especially when her character is merely buffered with are lazy stereotypes of George Bush and his cronies. It's also very hard to like a character, no matter how well written, who is willfully and happily married for many years to a very unlikable buffoon.

Ultimately, I did enjoy this book, partly due to its gimmick occasionally working and giving true insight into the fallibility of a presidential couple. Also, Sittenfeld is quite often a very masterful writer, communicating ideas and emotions very accurately and very bluntly. She always seems to choose the right words and have very economical sentences and structure. It is unfortunate that, despite her talents, the overall narrative lacks the same depth and nuance of one of the worst presidencies ever to befall our nation.

I would recommend this book at the moment because it really does make you think about how love and politics can be such a separate thing, and with a new President and First Lady entering the office, it definitely sheds some light on the reality of the function of a presidential wife. Although I am still grasping for whether or not it answers some fundamental questions about how those love and politics co-exist, the book definitely poses some interesting questions and keeps you thinking about how people can end up in any situation so quickly and unexpectedly.