American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld has done something that many young writers with smash-hit first novels are unable to do: she's gotten better. Prep was a socially conscious and deliciously catty look at an elite boarding school: Gossip Girls for the literate. Following Prep, she quietly released the even lighter The Man of My Dreams, which, I admit, I didn't even pick up. Sittenfeld struck me as a "French-fry" writer: you know there's a real potato in there somewhere, but it's buried under a heck of a lot of grease.

American Wife retains all of Prep's best qualities--class analysis, vivid characterization, and a gut-wrenching lesbian subplot--while avoiding its major pitfall: an irksome narrator. Lee Fiora was articulate and intelligent, but she was also cowardly and conniving; while I was able to stomach her, several readers I know found her grating. But Alice Blackwell, whose life we follow in American Wife, is even-tempered and compassionate. She is also somewhat timid and passive, but her flaws don't make her unbearable; they make her human.

And human is exactly what Sittenfeld is shooting for. American Wife has been widely publicized as a fictionalized account of the life of Laura Bush. From early tragedy to presidential paramour, Mrs. Bush's life is mapped out in exquisite, often painful detail, and it includes the intrigues of several thinly veiled public figures. The strength of this book lies in Sittenfeld's ability to render ambiguous even the most apparently monolithic characters: the feisty grandmother has a repressed, conventional side; the shy librarian has her secrets; and Charlie Blackwell, future president of the United Sates, is by turns drunken, sweet, ignorant, goofy, and well-meaning (though in all cases he is decidedly out of his element once in the Oval Office).

By the end of the book, I felt--gulp--compassion for some of the world's best-known Republicans (and I lean pretty far to the left). To me, this ability to make sympathetic people who are usually reduced to caricature was the book's biggest feat. But it is also the quality that might turn others off: in some ways, the book is a traditional "apology," providing explanations, even excuses, where perhaps there should be none. If a president makes huge mistakes and costs thousands of lives, does it really matter whether he was basically well-intentioned?

(Of course, it is also helpful--but oddly difficult--to remember that these are characters, not the men themselves. Sittenfeld is not writing biography, however closely her "fictional" situations mirror reality.)

The book is a quick read, if not quite as easy as Prep, and it satisfies as an intellectual's version of "beach book." In American Wife, Sittenfeld proves she doesn't want to be a "French fry" or any kind of tasty side dish: she's aiming for the main course. With few missteps, she makes it.