The Book Lady’s Blog

Available for purchase September 2nd.

American Wife is the story of Alice Lindgren, a middle-class woman (and registered Democrat) from a small town in Wisconsin who grows up to become a children’s librarian but then falls in love with an impish young dilettante from a famously rich and political family and eventually finds herself the unlikely First Lady of the United States.  Sound familiar?  It should.

Sittenfeld has spoken openly about the fact that American Wife is loosely based upon/inspired by the life of Laura Bush, and this is evident throughout the book.  Basically, Sittenfeld has taken major events from the life of the First Lady and written in her own imaginings of what those experiences must have been like.  She has taken extensive creative license and filled in the gaps left by the real-life First Lady’s justifiable reticence to divulge her private life to the public. I’ll give it to Curtis Sittenfeld—this is an interesting premise for writing a book, and many people are raving about it, but it just didn’t work for me. However, I don’t want to ruin it for those of you who do plan to read the book, so I’ll do my best to refrain from spoilers.

The first major event in Alice’s life is a tragic car accident that leaves her, at the age of seventeen, devastated and uncertain of how to go on with life. This did happen to Laura Bush in real life, and I imagine that it must have been awful.  Sittenfeld succeeds in making Alice’s character sympathetic despite the fact that her actions and decisions following the accident lead to a disturbing turn of events that many readers will find offensive and/or extremely controversial.  In more casual settings, I’ve used the word “scandalicious” to describe these scenes.  They were difficult to read, and I’m confident that many of the sweet little conservative ladies who pick up American Wife because they want to read a nice novel about the First Lady are going to be shocked, and rightly so.  It seems clear to me that Sittenfeld is going for shock value.  After all, controversy = buzz = selling books.

When the narrative jumps more than ten years into the future, we find Alice relucantly attending a backyard barbecue with her best friend Dena.  Dena has heard that Charlie Blackwell (the aforementioned impish young dilettante) will be there, and she is planning to seduce him. Dena swoops in and gives it her best effort, but Charlie is drawn to Alice, and they begin a whilrwind relationship.  The scenes describing the early days of their relationship are sweet and represent some of the best writing in the book.  However, there are several steamy sex scenes that ordinarily wouldn’t bother me, but they seem out of place and unnecessary given the context and overall arc of the narrative.  I’m no prude, but I don’t really need to know about Charlie’s skill with oral sex, and again, it seemed that Sittenfeld was hoping to shock her readers.

As Alice and Charlie’s story progresses, we see several more events that are recognizable from the life of our current First Lady—Charlie buys a baseball team, develops a substance abuse problem, becomes a born-again Christian, becomes governor, and is then declared president following a close and contested election.  The tragedies of September 11th take place, and Charlie leads America into a war that is hotly debated and potentially ill-advised, and Alice stands by her man despite her misgivings and her questions about his motives. Sittenfeld also borrows popular headlines, including the story of Cindy Sheehan (the mother whose son was killed in Iraq and who camped out in Washington demanding to speak with the president), who appears in a markedly different but easily recognizable character.

While I certainly didn’t love American Wife, I didn’t hate it, either. Sittenfeld’s writing is actually pretty good, and the story is interesting but not in a can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next kind of way. I’ve read several positive reviews, and I think many people are going to love this book—it just isn’t the kind of book I regularly read or enjoy, but I had to see what the hype was about.  Sittenfeld develops Alice’s character rather skillfully, enabling readers to understand her personality and her motives and to know why she makes the decisions she does, even if we may not agree with them. That said, there were several aspects of Alice’s character that I found grating, particularly the way that she attributes several of her personality flaws or weaknesses to the fact that she is female.

I also think I would have enjoyed the novel more if I hadn’t known what it was based on, or if Sittenfeld had come up with a completely original story about a woman who happens to grow up and marry a man who will become president.  The way that Sittenfeld pulled events from a real person’s life and linked them together with her imagined stories felt cheap to me…it seems like cheating, or like an exercise from a writing class that she decided to extend into a novel.  It doesn’t bother me when authors fictionalize events or themes from their own lives; in fact, I have thoroughly enjoyed many such novels (Tim O’Brian and John Irving come to mind as favorites), but to take a string of events from someone else’s life, especially someone with such a well-established and widely known reputation, and use it to provide structure for a story you otherwise wouldn’t have at all just seems lazy. Something about it just didn’t sit well with me. Granted, it is a brilliant marketing tactic, particularly as the book is being released (one can only assume that this is far from coincidental) during the week of the Republican National Convention….but I think that was the problem for me—it felt gimmicky.

However, I did love that Alice was thoughtful and introspective and a true bibliophile, and I thought Sittenfeld gave her several wonderful passages about faith and books and the importance of reading. These were some of the highlights for me:

That the world was miraculous, frequently in inexplicable ways, I would not argue. That these miracles had any relationship to the buildings we called churches, to the sequences of words we called prayers—that I was less sure of.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

For all my resistance to organized religion…I don’t believe Charlie would have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose—what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?—and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

So, I didn’t love American Wife, but I didn’t hate it, and I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions and debates it will spark upon its release on Tuesday. I’ll be very surprised if the White House doesn’t release some statement in response.  There is definitely an audience for a novel like this, and I will be recommending it to friends and customers for whom it will be a better fit. All in all, I’m giving American Wife 3.75 out of 5.