In 2004, when Curtis Sittenfeld was 28 and awaiting publication of her acclaimed debut novel, Prep, she was compelled to pen an essay for Salon.com. While President Bush’s “policies are at best misguided and at worst evil,” she wrote, “I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more.”
The most substantial and pervasive problem with American Wife, a starry-eyed novelization of the life and marriage of the first lady, is not the numbing drone in which it is written. No, that essential literary failing is merely the byproduct of Sittenfeld’s earnest (and apparently unflagging) devotion to Bush, who here is named Alice Blackwell, nee Lindgren.
What was effective, even poignant, about Prep and – to a lesser extent – Sittenfeld’s 2006 follow-up novel, The Man of My Dreams, was rooted in the simple, human flaws of the books’ central characters. Lee Fiora, the homely, insecure protagonist of Prep, tentatively makes her way through an elite East Coast boarding school; Hannah Gavener, the homely, insecure protagonist of Sittenfeld’s sophomore effort, tentatively makes her way through a series of misguided stabs at romantic success.
Other than minor differences of geography and socioeconomics, both books could have been written about the same woman. And that woman seemed close enough to Sittenfeld’s heart as to, gosh, maybe even resemble her own identity.
Perhaps that’s why Sittenfeld is so anxious and fumbling in her attempts to draft her Bush surrogate as realistically imperfect – even though she’s still, you know, the public figure Sittenfeld admires most. (Take a moment to really absorb the implications of that declaration. Is Sittenfeld aware that there are more than, say, a dozen “public figures” from which she could choose?)
By fussing so mightily to do justice to her beloved Laura Bush, she ends up with a flatly inhuman construct whose “good” qualities, like intelligence, compassion and wit, all feel eerily robotic. And yet somehow, Sittenfeld finds room for graphic rhapsodies about the erect penis of Alice’s husband – you know, a guy who’s modeled on our two-term commander in chief.
Sittenfeld saddles Alice with a variety of ostensible mistakes and ethical lapses, all the while keeping her aglow with an overriding modesty that, if not outright false, is at the very least insipid. When sheltered teenage Alice finds out her beloved grandmother is a big ol’ lesbian, she’s totally mean to her! At least for a brief period of time that ends with a totally heartfelt epiphany!
When slightly older Alice has a lot of cheap and dirty sex, and ultimately an abortion (did Sittenfeld make sure to mention in every 14th paragraph that Laura-I-mean-Alice is totally pro-choice?), it’s only because she’s totally fraught with grief after causing a car accident in which a classmate was killed.
But Sittenfeld’s palpable desire to demonstrate that Bush is — in celeb-magazine parlance — Just Like Us!, backfires. In the past, when she’s focused on characters with which she legitimately had more in common, her work was never lacking in emotional authenticity. (You might not have particularly liked Lee or Hannah, but at least they felt real.) Taking on a woman to whom the author can only aspire to relate diminishes the fledgling talent Sittenfeld once seemed to possess — and may, in the future, evince again.
You may believe Laura Bush is a kind and wonderful woman; a strong, wise proponent of literacy and impoverished children. Or maybe you believe she’s someone who has remained unconscionably silent, while her husband and his administration have done things that some people — including, as Sittenfeld seems certain, Mrs. Bush herself — find appalling if not outright criminal.
But what is impossible to believe, regardless of how you feel about the woman who inspired her,
is that Alice Blackwell is anything more than a two-dimensional shadow of a character, or that the book she inhabits isn’t just a vapid, oddly childish writing exercise.