Lazy Staycation: Reading American Wife

When I ended up with a bit of Barnes and Noble credit a few months ago, I veered for the first time (but not the last) from my buying-no-books-in-2009 plan. With that credit I bought the creepy, wonderful, impossible-to-forget We Need To Talk About Kevin and the far less disturbing American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sittenfeld takes the broad outlines of Laura Bush's life, from the tragic car accident in her youth to her days as a librarian to her marriage to a well-to-do good ol' boy. From this foundation, Sittenfeld builds the fictional account of Alice Lindgren Blackwell. Hating George W. Bush and his administration, I wans't sure how sympathetic I'd find the characters in this novel, and it's to Sittenfeld's credit that she really creates a protagonist that I wanted to spend time with.

Alice is the heart and soul of American Wife and the fact that it's easy to like her allows us to see Charlie Blackwell (aka Dubya) more sympathetically because all of his antics are filtered through her eyes. That said, she also stacks the deck in Charlie's favor because the majority of the book is about Alice's early life and the first part of her relationship with Charlie. Campaigns and governorship are glossed over, and the couple's time in the White House is only a small portion of the novel. Alice's thoughts on abortion and the war are plot points, but many of the other controversial elements Sittenfeld could have drawn on barely make a blip.

This works because the novel is more about relationships and characters than it is about politics. The surprise coupling of a hard working, book loving librarian and a privileged party boy provide Sittenfeld with plenty to explore without getting bogged down in anything resembling policy. The book is a good one and definitely a page turner, but it's far more of a character study than it is a political novel.