Post by wheelspinner on Jan 24, 2009 2:47:31 GMT -5
I just finished reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.
It's a novel that both works and doesn't work. A barely-disguised account of the life of Laura Bush, it is at its best when recounting the early life of its protagonist, Alice Lindgren, and especially the trauma of the road accident that changes her life.
Her whirlwind romance with Charlie Blackwell, the feckless scion of a wealthy political family (guess who) and the subsequent marital tensions are also well-told and the stage is set for an interesting conclusion as Charlie's political career begins to unfold.
And then it all falls apart.
The final quarter of the book is a section called '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue' that is so close to recent current events that Sittenfeld might as well have dropped the pretense of fiction. It even extends to references to Hurricane Katrina and to "Charlie" seeking to get the Patriot Act renewed. In this section her characters cease being her own and just become cyphers for their real-life counterparts, and the writing becomes Curtis' take on the Bush Presidency. The reader can't help but mentally substitutes Bush, Laura, Rove et al for their fictional counterparts and map the plot onto real events. It's clunky in the extreme.
It's a shame, because the novel's concept is a very good one. It would have been quite possible to have written about the great themes of the Bush Presidency from the point of view of the First Lady without so explicitly linking plot incidents to current events. Instead of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, Sittenfeld could have concocted analogous events from her own imagination to develop her plot. Her approach seems, to me, to be both clumsy and lazy.
There are quite a lot of books that do what Sittenfeld was trying without being so obvious, and are much better for it. Rather than burying herself in biographies of the Bushes for her research, she would have done well to have read novels by Gore Vidal or Don de Lillo that make far better fictional use of real events.
It's a novel that both works and doesn't work. A barely-disguised account of the life of Laura Bush, it is at its best when recounting the early life of its protagonist, Alice Lindgren, and especially the trauma of the road accident that changes her life.
Her whirlwind romance with Charlie Blackwell, the feckless scion of a wealthy political family (guess who) and the subsequent marital tensions are also well-told and the stage is set for an interesting conclusion as Charlie's political career begins to unfold.
And then it all falls apart.
The final quarter of the book is a section called '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue' that is so close to recent current events that Sittenfeld might as well have dropped the pretense of fiction. It even extends to references to Hurricane Katrina and to "Charlie" seeking to get the Patriot Act renewed. In this section her characters cease being her own and just become cyphers for their real-life counterparts, and the writing becomes Curtis' take on the Bush Presidency. The reader can't help but mentally substitutes Bush, Laura, Rove et al for their fictional counterparts and map the plot onto real events. It's clunky in the extreme.
It's a shame, because the novel's concept is a very good one. It would have been quite possible to have written about the great themes of the Bush Presidency from the point of view of the First Lady without so explicitly linking plot incidents to current events. Instead of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, Sittenfeld could have concocted analogous events from her own imagination to develop her plot. Her approach seems, to me, to be both clumsy and lazy.
There are quite a lot of books that do what Sittenfeld was trying without being so obvious, and are much better for it. Rather than burying herself in biographies of the Bushes for her research, she would have done well to have read novels by Gore Vidal or Don de Lillo that make far better fictional use of real events.