BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: American Wife (Curtis Sittenfeld, author)
Historical Fiction, First Lady, Laura and George W. Bush premise, fatal automobile accident, termination of pregnancy, marriage, motherhood, grandmother, Mid-West, Wisconsin, Washington, DC.
Don’t avoid this book because you fear that it is political or because you don’t generally read across political party lines. Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is a satisfyingly long, fictional story that imagines much of the life and inner thoughts of a woman who becomes The First Lady of the United States. Yes, it is based upon (and is clearly identifiable as) the life of Laura Bush. Sittenfeld uses some known, public facts about Mrs. Bush’s life to frame the story, but the particulars that make it sing are spun of whole cloth and are purely fictional. For example, in the novel, Alice Blackwell (our Laura Bush character) is an only child and lives a largely quiet and book-filled, modest Mid-West childhood with her banker father and at-home mother. She becomes a teacher and then a librarian. These facts track the publicly known life of Laura Bush. The novel also does include a tragic automobile accident in which the novel’s heroine, Alice Blackwell, crashes her car into another, and the driver of the other car is killed. Laura Bush experienced a similar tragic and life-altering event in her life, which also is public knowledge. Finally, Alice meets and marries the charming but underachieving, wealthy, Charlie Blackwell– a recognizable representation of George W. Bush. Charlie is from a large, boisterous and political family and is a bit of a black sheep among the accomplished siblings.
These underlying facts that echo those of the Laura and George Bush are just jumping off points for this rich novel. First some known facts are thinly altered. The novel is set in Wisconsin and the Blackwells vacation on a compound at Lake Michigan. The Bush family hails from Texas and their family summer compound is famously located in Kennebunkport, Maine. George W. Bush attended Yale and Harvard Business School. Charlie Blackwell is a Princeton and Wharton School of Business alum, albeit, like Bush, not one touted for his academic prowess at either institution. Nonetheless, the reader spends little time wondering what is fact and what is fiction, because Sittenfeld creates such a complex and complete interior emotional and intellectual world for Alice, that the exercise of parsing fiction from fact quickly falls to the wayside.
At its core, American Wife is a story about how the events of our childhoods and young adulthoods shape us forever, and about the never-seen complexities that live and breathe inside any marriage. Alice Blackwell is fundamentally formed by key parts of her childhood and young life: the relative quiet and harmony of her modest only-child home in Riley, Wisconsin; the presence of her loving, spirited and book-loving grandmother; her role in the automobile death of her classmate; and her decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in her senior year of high school. Alice is modest, apolitical, open-minded, thoughtful and reserved. Similarly, Charlie Blackwell is a product of his own background: his family is wealthy and privileged and moves in elite circles; he has a strong and opinionated mother, he has boisterous and often bawdy brothers; and later in life he becomes sober and a born-again Christian. Each half of this duo is drawn to the other not only because each can be her (or his) authentic self with the other, but also precisely because of their essential differences; theirs is a case of where opposites can complement and balance one another. Alice collides with and chafes at much of the privilege and entitlement that radiates from the Blackwell clan, and her discomfort allows her to serve as much-needed ballast for Charlie as their life unfolds.
The novel is divided into four segments. The first is Alice’s childhood. The second is her young adulthood and twenties. The third is her courtship with and marriage to Charlie and the ups and downs of their married years. Only the fourth segment is set during Alice and Charlie’s White House years. There are references to September 11th, and the war in Afghanistan, and the critics of Blackwell’s presidency which echo those of Bush’s administration. In the novel, Alice Blackwell, like Laura Bush, devotes her time to non-controversial causes such as literacy and women’s health. Yet, it is the lasting impact of Alice’s automobile accident and her closely held abortion secret, known to Charlie and only a handful of others, that generate the tension of the novel.
Not far into the book, I released the mental gymnastics around comparing Alice Blackwell’s life to Laura Bush’s and I enjoyed living alongside Alice Blackwell as a character in a novel. Alice is fundamentally a simple and kind woman who never imagined she would become The First Lady of the United States. Not only did Alice Blackwell not seek the role, she was a reluctant partner in Charlie’s ambitions, and his need to prove his worth to his family. That said, her calmness, her complexity and her ability to refrain from offering opinions or intervening in policy decisions may have what made her a beloved First Lady and the perfect companion to her husband, the President. While these personal qualities may well echo those of Laura Bush as First Lady, in American Wife, these traits are intrinsic to the character of Alice Blackwell.
American Wife caused me to reflect on how little we truly know about the interior lives and motivations of public figures. It also reminded me how readily we jump to conclusions about people we do not know; we make assumptions based only on what little we see in the news. How quickly we forget that every person is engaged in unshared struggles we cannot imagine. Making judgments presumes knowledge we cannot and will never have; we are wiser to set aside judgment in favor of curiosity and compassion. American Wife also serves as a reminder of the often unrecognized (but not insignificant) contributions of a spouse or partner in the success of a public figure. Rarely does great achievement happen in a vacuum or without significant support behind the scenes. John Dunne famously said, “No man is an island,/Entire of itself./Every man is a piece of the continent;/A part of the main.” Nowhere is that more true than in the continent we all know as marriage.
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