American Wife

Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

Age: Adult

Lest you think that I spend ALL my time reading teen vampire romances, I thought I'd write about an actual adult novel. American Wife is inspired by the life of Laura Bush. The Laura character's name is Alice Lindgren.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first part, Alice is a teenager in a small town in Wisconsin. She finally gets a chance to go on a date with the boy she's been in love with for years, and as she's driving to meet him and he's driving to meet her, one of them runs a stop sign and she plows into his car and kills him. Something like this actually happened to Laura Bush...what a crazy thing to try to recover from. So obviously teenage Alice is left reeling from this, and her life just gets messier, resulting in an illegal abortion. (Unlike the car accident, there's no evidence that Laura Bush ever had an abortion, but despite her husband's politics she is publicly pro-choice.)

In the second part of the book, Alice is in her late twenties, working as an elementary school librarian and spending her summer making papier mache characters with which to decorate the library. She's single (not having had much success in romance) and getting older. She meets Charlie Blackwell (the Dubya character) at a friend's barbecue, and doesn't expect to like him, but somehow she finds herself falling for him. He's from a wealthy family so he's never really had to work, and he's trying (without much success) to get into politics. But he's also funny, and handsome, and he actually really likes her. Now she just has to figure out how to stand his crass, overbearing family.

In part three, Alice and Charlie are entering middle age, and they're having problems in their marriage...mostly brought on by his alcoholism and general uselessness (he wants to buy a baseball team?). 

Finally, in part four, Charlie has cleaned up, found a purpose, and is the president of the United States. I liked part four the least. The rest of the book is so good, and then it just seems to devolve into the standard "BOO Iraq war" rhetoric. That's right, Charlie's gotten himself into a messy war in Iraq, and Alice doesn't approve or agree. It might seem unlikely that a couple with so many political differences could end up together, and stay together, especially when the husband has a career in politics, but for the most part Sittenfeld makes it work. One of the things I liked the most about the book was how it made me think about marriage...how two people can make a relationship last for decades, how they can deal with ups and downs and disagreements and stay in love, and how one spouse can make sacrifices to support the other's dreams. 

But I don't like books that make me feel like I'm being politically manipulated. Don't get me wrong...I'm not advocating war, and I think books with a general anti-war theme are good and necessary. But if I wanted to read long complaints about the Iraq war I would just spend some time on msn, instead of reading a novel.


On the whole, though, the first three parts of the book are good enough to make up for the fourth and make the book worth reading. In a country where it seems that everyone has to be rigidly divided into Democrat or Republican, it's hard to figure out what motivates Sittenfeld. The book is so pro-abortion and anti-Iraq-war, but at the same time she portrays the Bushes with so much sensitivity, making them so human and relatable that you can't help but like them. (At least I can't...but I never really hated them in the first place, so I'd love to hear what other people think of them after reading this).

If you've read Prep, you'll already know that Sittenfeld's genius is in creating characters that are so plausible, so utterly human and open and real. I don't know anything about the Bushes except what's available to the general public, and I don't think she does either, but she draws from their public personas and creates a very likely portrayal of what's going on underneath. I don't know them personally, but after reading this book I wish I did, and I feel like if I were to get to know them, and they were exactly like Alice and Charlie, I wouldn't be surprised.


The one flaw, I think, in her creation of the characters is that she chooses to place the Blackwells in Wisconsin instead of in Texas. I feel like the Bush's policies and personalities are so tied to their Texan-ness that it's hard to imagine or believe the same sort of people would come out of Wisconsin.



Recommended for readers who like: Prep; biographies of historical figures; honest books about the complexity of marriage