American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

I first heard about American Wife through an article in the Books section of the New York Times a few weeks ago. Michiko Kakutani’s article, “First Lady, Second Version,” piqued my curiosity. I have always been interested in the First Lady’s duality of self, especially after I became a librarian. I found it fascinating, and sometimes infuriating, that a librarian could allow herself to stay married to a man like George W. Bush, to whom privacy is exchanged for “security” and the lives of American soldiers are exchanged for oil. This book has helped me reconcile these things, if only hypothetically, and it has helped me view the current First Lady in a more humanized perspective.

Despite the frequent claims that the book is out to smear the Bush Administration, it seems to have done the opposite for me. (They consider it a smear because it contains adequately detailed sex scenes between two consensual adults in three relationships, one of which winds up resulting in marriage. Are we Victorian, all of a sudden?) Maureen Dowd wrote in her Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, “Dreams of Laura,”

Ms. Sittenfeld was not out to sensationalize but sympathize. The portraits of Laura and W. — known as Alice and Charlie Blackwell here — are trenchant and make you like them more.

They become people, not just distant American symbols. They’re closer to the reader than they’ve ever been, and that’s not a bad thing.

Near the end of the book, there is paragraph that I believe represents this story as a whole. The heroine explains,

I could have lived a different life, but I lived this one. And perhaps it is not a coincidence that I married a man who would neither fault me nor even be aware of my failings. I married a man to whom I could compare favorably because if I have done little, he has done less, or perhaps more; if I have caused harm accidentally and indirectly, he has done so with qualmless intent and total confidence. (p. 553)

One particular passage that I relished, both as a librarian and a bookworm, was:

…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. (p. 321)

I was hooked to this book from the moment I started reading it. Sittenfeld’s writing is powerfully evocative and smart, though not terribly challenging. She accomplishes wonders with her prose, and I would highly recommend this book to anyone at all interested in Laura Bush. (5/5)

Read more about American Wife here:

• Huffington Post: “Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife Provides Fictionalized Portrait of Laura Bush”
• LA Times: “‘American Wife’ by Curtis Sittenfeld” by Susan Salter Reynolds
• New York Magazine: “Go Ask Alice” by Sam Anderson
• Salon: “Sex, power, and Laura Bush” by Rebecca Traister
• Time: “Q&A: Curtis Sittenfeld” by Radhika Jones