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Review: "American Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld

BY HELEN EISENBACH | Special to Newsday

September 28, 2008

AMERICAN WIFE, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, 558 pp., 26.

Who is Laura Bush?

In our all-access/ maximum-exposure/ staged-reality tabloid culture, she is a mega-celebrity who has managed to be completely invisible, a blank slate upon whom we can project our notions of womanhood - as much a living litmus test as her polar opposite, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to whom people reflexively ascribe the qualities of the strong-minded female relatives and colleagues who challenge or annoy them.

In "American Wife," novelist Curtis Sittenfeld aims to lay bare our enigmatic first lady, whose serene facade remains unbroken despite the high drama in her life, including a vehicular homicide when she was a teen.

Sittenfeld's ur-Laura is Alice Lindgren, a passive, proper girl who lives with devoted parents, reveres her brash, book-loving grandmother, and lets her bossy best friend, Dena, run her life. Alice's peace is shattered when she loses her true love - first to Dena's avidity and her own reticence, then by killing him in an auto accident. Other losses follow: estrangement from her grandmother on discovering her with a female lover; a self-punishing affair with her dead love's angry brother (and resulting abortion); her father's death and mother's imminent ruin at the hands of Alice's ex-lover; and the cooling of Dena's affections. Only the last is softened by a prize: the entitled, handsome scion of a Republican dynasty, Charlie Blackwell, whom Dena wants but who soon sweeps Alice off her feet and into the White House.

The bulk of the novel concerns itself with this unlikely union, which begs for clarification in art and life. Charlie is meant to be an irresistible charmer, a man of grinning, winning ways, yet the dialogue given him will do little to enhance readers' perceptions of the original: "Are you turned on by my virile man scent?" "I gotta take a whiz." "We need to consummate this thing pronto." Sittenfeld loads the book with explicit physical scenes, as if sex alone defines character, but her tone, at once gracelessly clinical and romance-novel cliched, divests the repeated couplings of whatever heat or light they might convey.

Sittenfeld's previous works, "Prep" and "The Man of My Dreams," each had a vitality and brash, authentic voice; if their subject matter was hardly epic, it seemed to spring from their creator's urgency, propelling us through her pages. Here Sittenfeld has built an entire book around a prim yet prurient, essentially blank figure: "I don't usually have a great deal to say ... and I am perfectly content to listen. ... I can't bear pretending to have an opinion when I don't." I wondered about Sittenfeld's intentions, if she were attempting satire or misstepping with a lifeless, unconvincing narrative voice pitched neither to an intimate reader (too stilted) nor posterity (too puerile). (The author's motivation for the filthy limerick/

explosive diarrhea moment is perhaps best left unexplored.)

Fiction about recognizable people must cast a spell that withstands the real-world details we already know. Yet Alice barely inhabits these pages; the minutiae of her daily existence are reported without the emotional reality of how it feels to live in her skin. How does she navigate her fundamental differences in faith, political affiliation and intellect with Charlie? Alice's rare moments of analysis, artificial and unpersuasive, do little to edify.

One scene shows what the novel could have been, had Sittenfeld jettisoned her high-concept assignment to follow a more authentic voice. When Alice breaks character to face an African-American retired colonel sitting vigil, Cindy Sheehan-style, for his son, the moment is both pointed and dramatically moving.

In a society where Oliver Stone-styled versions of reality stand as accepted wisdom, perhaps most readers aren't shocked when artists assign their own twisted or tender fantasies to public figures' lives. "American Wife" won't answer the question "Who is Laura Bush?" But the novel's question should be "Who is Alice Lindgren?" After nearly 600 pages, I couldn't say - or, finally, care.