American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Fiction, Published 2008
Read March 2009
3/5
From the Cover:
A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is seventeen shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege. And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with – and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.
Review:
This was the first book to be read by my work book club. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it, much more so than I did. What really is great about this book is the author’s prose. She really pushes the story along and you always want to find out what’s going to happen to Alice next.
The novels opens and ends with Alice Blackwell wondering whether or not she’s made terrible mistakes in her life. One tragic mistake in her teenage years completely rearranges the course of her life and she often romanticizes the relationship she had with the boy that was killed in the car accident. A relationship that haunts and taunts her from the time of the accident through then end of the novel when Alice is in her sixties.
My favorite character in the book was Alice’s grandmother, Emilie, appropriately enough. She always held to her beliefs and lived a life she thought was truthful within her circumstances. Even though she lived a small town life and never pursued moving to the big city with her lover, she stood by her family and a life she felt needed and loved.
I think Alice lives in her past, in the relationship she never had with Andrew and in the single life as a librarian. When she meets Charlie in her early thirties, she exchanges her entire life for one of privilege and Alice seems to always question whether she is worthy of such a life. I think she struggles to live with Charlie. What was once seen as fun loving, easy going Charlie become annoying and irresponsible behavior, especially when their daughter, Ella, is young. But Alice soon learns that you can’t change a man, he has to change himself. I became really annoyed with the characterization of Charlie, especially right before his and Alice’s separation, but others enjoyed him in the novel.
The fourth section of the novel seemed to be where everyone got bogged down in Alice’s retrospection. Some of the events I think were a little far fetched. I don’t think Dr. Wycomb would have turned on Alice or her grandmother and I don’t think the scene with Colonel Franklin would have ever been allowed to occur. I was happy with Alice’s reunion with her friend Dena, but I think it was self-serving for Alice and would have been more meaningful if she had no ajenda to see her. Even though Alice enjoyed the reunion, I doubt she visited Dena again.
Overall, I enjoyed the flow of the novel and there’s a sense of wonderment as to which events are based on fact and which were completely made up. I’m not sure what Laura Bush would think of this novel, but I imagine she lives an entire life separate from the public’s eye as Alice did.
Quotes:
But what I did care about, what I wanted most fervently, was for her [Ella] to understand that hard work paid off, that decency begat decency, that humility was not a raincoat you occasionally pulled on when you thought conditions called for it, but rather a constant way of existing in the world, knowing that good and bad luck touched everyone and none of us was fully responsible for our fortunes or tragedies. (p. 401)
As one of my predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.” (p. 463)
A relationship for which you suppress and censor your beliefs is no relationship at all. (p. 529)
