'Cosmic Coincidence?'...[Laura Bush]...{Runs stop sign}>>>Kills
Boyfriend<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>....{16 days Before the Death of JFK< in Dallas
Texas....}
"Truth is Stranger That Fiction!"...
For sure!...<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
A story based on the Life of the 'Mysterious Laura Bush, of Midland, Texas...
American Wife
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 576 pp., $26
Well,
we still have free speech. The very existence of Curtis Sittenfeld's
audacious third novel, "American Wife," a well-researched, juicy roman
à clef about the current first lady, Laura Bush, makes that crystal
clear.
"American
Wife" also demonstrates that the author of "Prep" and "The Man of My
Dreams" has taken the necessary leap into the grown-up world of
marriage and politics, although she lingers for a few chapters along
the way in the insecure, self-sabotaging adolescent beat she pretty
much exhausted in her first two novels.The intensely private,
reserved Laura Bush might seem a surprising choice for the subject of a
570-page confessional novel. But the sad story of Laura's accident at
17, when she ran a stop sign in Midland, Texas, and killed a high
school romantic interest, is literary catnip to a writer who feasts on
adolescent angst. Sittenfeld could also identify with Laura’s passion
for literature. And who can resist wondering how the Bushes’
beauty-and-the-beast, lady-and-the-tramp marriage works? What does
Laura really think of her husband?As Maureen Dowd noted in a
July 9 New York Times op-ed column defending "American Wife" against
early attacks that it's all "smear" and "gossip," "There's only one
vessel that can ferry you past Laura's moat, and that's fiction." The
difficulty for the Bushes is that some readers may mistake Sittenfeld's
fiction for biography.Charlie Blackwell, her stand-in for George
W. Bush, is an uninhibited, grinning, crude, but amiable goofball whose
"ambitions exceed his talent." Alice Lindgren Blackwell, her stand-in
for Laura, fares better. But Sittenfeld, who used graphic sex scenes in
her first two novels to contrast healthy relationships with bad ones,
gets into bed with her characters again. Beyond the inherent prurience
of imagining the first lady's premarital sex life, it's a stretch to
believe that this reserved character would include such details in a
narrative, even to herself.Alice's voice is modest and refined.
Her story is divided into four neat sections, each headed by the
address where she lived at the time. The first three are in her home
state of Wisconsin; Sittenfeld, an Ohio native, chose a Midwestern
state in place of Texas. The prologue and final section are set at 1600
Pennsylvania Ave.An uneasy night in the White House causes Alice
to review her life's trajectory. While her husband, President
Blackwell, snores peacefully beside her, Alice is awake worrying
whether she's done the right thing supporting him in policies with
which she disagrees-- anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, the war in
Iraq. Was she wrong to finally speak her own mind in public that day?
Where does duty lie as an American wife?The first quarter of the
novel veers into what a character in Sittenfeld's previous novel
labeled her usual "low-self-esteem shtick." After her accident, Alice
martyrs herself to her dead boyfriend's brutish brother, ending up
needing an abortion. Like many other elements in this well-crafted but
often excessively detailed novel, this has reverberations decades later.She's
headed toward spinsterhood as a 31-year-old school librarian when she
meets Charlie, the "rascally, naughty" youngest son of Wisconsin's
governor. Despite the overwhelming Blackwell clan, which includes a
sharp-tongued matriarch, Alice marries Charlie within months. They have
one daughter, and she quits her job. Charlie works -- desultorily -- in
the family meat business and sinks into alcoholism before being born
again. He eventually runs for governor and then president, "in it for
the power and adventure and human connection and not because of any
wonkish devotion to or interest in the issues."Sittenfeld spares
us the campaigns and elections, but she doesn't stint on much else,
including details about Princeton reunions and Alice's recurring guilt.
She captures the rub of marital friction and convincingly charts a day
in the life of a first lady. Although "American Wife" probes
far-reaching issues about marriage and responsibility, it is the
implied questions about whether our president is "incompetent and
foolish" that are bound to raise hackles.As a career move,
"American Wife" is brilliant, with its timely, sensational back story.
If it goes on at too great length for some of us, well, so does the
administration it depicts, many critics would contend. But, as
Sittenfeld's character says to one of her husband's detractors, "Aren't
we both lucky to live in a country that allows the expression of this
kind of criticism?"'Wife' draws on Laura Bush's life in novel ways
By
Heller McAlpin
August 30, 2008
