American Wife

Just finished this novel by Curtis Sittenfeld. It's some 500 pages, and I must confess I haven't for ages read a novel that long from the beginning to the end.

The story is told by the voice of Alice Blackwell, the main character of the book and who, basically, is Laura Bush in disguise. As written in the blurb: "American Wife is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady. Her husband, his parents, and certain prominent members of his administration are recognizable. All other characters in the novel are products of the author's imagination, as are the incidents concerning them."

I suppose guys will find this book essentially feminine. There are detailed accounts of the psychology of a female at different stages of her life - as a child, a teenager, a young lady, a single woman, a married woman, a mother, a first lady. Alice is certainly reflective in character, perhaps because the novel is written in the first person narrative; but even readers (females) who are less of a ponderer than Alice are likely to find certain thought processes described in the book strikingly familiar - the sort of helplessness when stuck with an awkward date, the kind of shock when discovering certain truths about a family member, the estrangement when revisiting a place one used to live in, and so on - the author has done an impressive job in making Alice real.

So far so good for a book that is purely a novel, but the fact that Alice is actually based on Laura Bush gives the work a different perspective. Readers will inevitably compare the characters and incidents with the real ones under the Bush administration, but because there is only so much information available regarding public figures, it becomes impossible to judge whether a particular thing in the book is made up or not. Credit must be given to the research work done behind the scenes - the author quoted 5 reference books in her acknowledgments. However, one would ask: why write a novel based on Laura Bush? No hints are given in the author's acknowledgments, nor in the publisher's blurb. Perhaps it is just an experiment. But where political figures are involved, anything becomes political - is the author, after taking us through the life of Alice, inviting readers to review the Bush years in a more humanizing light? And to read this novel at this time, when Obama has just been elected as US President, gives it an interesting nuance.

The latter part of the book has a lot of descriptions on the frustration or irritation felt by Alice as a first lady when her statements are misquoted, or when friends betray her by revealing secrets or even untrue stories about her life. As readers start to sympathize with how difficult it is to be a first lady, the irony is, this novel may itself be an accomplice in betraying Laura Bush - I imagine the first lady will not be pleased when she reads about the various imagined incidents in the novel which, when mingled with other facts, suggest they may also be real? I hope she will take the book with good humour.