Word: sittenfeld
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...Bush has glided effortlessly through this presidency without a false step - an American sphinx, although one whose very presence conveys intimations of wisdom. Sittenfeld takes full creative advantage of that intelligent vagueness, and her novel encourages readers to do the same. I wonder, for example, what the First Lady would make of Jane Mayer's extraordinary account of the Bush Administration's torture policy, The Dark Side, which I read simultaneously with American Wife. It is no small astonishment that Sittenfeld's portrait of the President and his circle made Mayer's horror story more plausible for me: suddenly...
...attractive but almost catatonic with guilt: her carelessness behind the wheel once caused the death of a good friend. The prince is charming, as advertised, but also carefree in a way that the librarian envies and mistrusts. He adores her, without question. She succumbs, with reservations. In Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant novel American Wife, their names are Alice Lindgren and Charles Blackwell, and they come from Wisconsin. But we also know them, on the evening news, as Laura Welch and George W. Bush from Texas...
...Sittenfeld's audacious gamble is that she can make the reader understand why someone as civilized as Alice would fall for this force of nature and stay with him despite grave misgivings about his public persona. And it is Sittenfeld's triumph that we do. Charlie is a puerile, self-absorbed innocent but not unkind. (Alice would never tolerate that.) He is an excellent father and a faithful husband; the pure pleasure of his company overwhelms Alice's need to punish herself for her lethal mistake. He is clever and insightful - his emotional intelligence beggars his intellect - and blithely uninformed...
...Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was distinguished by the dead-on observations of upper-class life by a working-class narrator - a narrator, one imagines, not unlike Sittenfeld herself, who was jolted from Cincinnati to the rarefied precincts of the Groton School in Massachusetts. There is a similar class consciousness in American Wife, especially in the luscious passages in which Alice describes her first encounters with the Blackwell family at its summer estate, Halcyon, on Lake Michigan. The Blackwells are overwhelming, especially the materfamilias, known as Maj (short for "Her Majesty"). They are classic inbred Wasps, fetishizers of the threadbare...
...Sittenfeld boldly skips over the politics that lands Charlie Blackwell in the White House. It is "the part that everybody knows," Alice says, picking up the narrative in the seventh year of the Blackwell presidency. It all seems a whirlwind to Alice, in any case, a tornado spinning too fast to be comprehensible - Charlie for President? Charlie as President? Charlie as the ultimate arbiter of war and peace? Indeed, Alice belatedly finds herself facing a moral dilemma: Was it possible that the disaster of Charlie's presidency - the war, the thousands dead - was her fault, just as the long...