A really good read - American Wife
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
When American Wife was recommended to me by a friend whose reading choices I always trust, I can’t say I approached it with huge enthusiasm. First it’s quite a tome of a book, a chunky 635 pages in all. Second it’s about a not entirely fictional woman (more of that in a mo) who reluctantly becomes First Lady of the United States, so I assumed it would be dense with politics, and American politics at that.
If on reading both those things you’re inclined to say it’s not for you either, let me encourage you to change your mind, because American Wife is a hugely enjoyable, revealing and absorbing examination of the life of a quiet, bookish, happily unambitious small-town woman and how she comes to call arguably the world’s most prestigious address her home.
Alice Blackwell, the titular American Wife, is based more than loosely on former First Lady Laura Bush with real characters and historical events from her life and the lives of her family woven into Curtis Sittenfeld’s smart and captivating fictional story.
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of American Wife
When we first meet Alice it’s 1954 and she’s a third grade student at the local high school in the small mid-western town of Riley. Curtis plunges into the minutiae of Alice’s daily life and family history and circumstances in a way that becomes the story’s familiar, and cleverly revealing hallmark. It is through the apparently mundane domestic details that we discover, see and understand how Alice’s formative experiences (including a tragedy that will continue to haunt her throughout her life, and a situation that will come to potentially jeopardise her future husband’s presidency) play a part in shaping the young woman she is when she is introduced to charismatic Charlie, the younger son of a wealthy, dynastic family of politicians and high achievers.
Their whirlwind courtship and marriage open up a new and often bewildering world to the young Alice, which she sets about finding her place in with typical quiet determination. The challenges the couple face as the years pass, how Alice confronts and supports Charlie as he faces down his demons, then decides, unexpectedly, pursue his political ambitions, are again seen through the lens of their daily domestic lives.
It is that consistent private rather than public focus which provides, for me, the most absorbing element of the last section of the book which covers the couple’s journey to, and time in, The White House. We witness the details of their start and end of the day routines, how becoming President and First Lady affects their interactions with their daughter, families and friends. And how, in spite of her own political views at times being far from aligned with her husband’s, Alice navigates and carves out her role alongside his.
Always feeling something of an observing outsider, Alice reflects on the nature of power and position, how it affects and distorts relationships, the extent to which she and Charlie are at the mercy of the way they are portrayed in the media, and how much of the ability to live in a way that is in any way normal has been forever taken away from them when he became President.
Love, intrigue, calamity, forgiveness, confrontation, humour, compromise, American Wife has it all. This is a book and a story that is brimming with heart, lucidity and insight and which carries, even careers, you through every one of its 600 plus pages.
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