The Perfect (American) Wife

I haven’t spent much time considering Laura Bush apart from thinking of her as the wife of that man. But after reading both a non-fictional and fictional account of her life in recent weeks I’ve decided she deserves more consideration for who she is and not who she’s married to.

In The Perfect Wife, Ann Gerhart outlines Laura Bush’s biography based on information gathered while covering the First Lady for the Washington Post and interviews with her friends and acquaintances. Although it’s not marketed as a tell-all, it does reveal a few shocking facts. She was in a car accident in high school that killed someone. She was a Democrat. She worked as a librarian at the same South Austin school where I taught summer school (I know, shocking). She was instrumental in designing a “green” home for their ranch near Crawford. She and W. call each other “Bushy.” Despite these facts, or maybe in spite of them, Laura Bush began to resemble a more three-dimensional person than the White House Commemorative Paper Doll book would have you believe.

Drawing “particular inspiration” from Gerhart’s book, Curtis Sittenfeld has centered her latest novel around a similar, but fictional, First Lady in American Wife.

When the novel opens, we learn the narrator, Alice Blackwell, is spending a wakeful night tossing and turning over the possibility she has jeopardized her husband’s presidency. Her husband, Charlie Blackwell, is a former playboy from a venerable Republican family. President Blackwell was elected in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote. Apart from a failed congressional run, his only political experience has been serving as the governor of Tex- I mean Wisconsin.

We follow Alice back through her school days, courtship with Charlie, and the early years of motherhood, and finally meet up with her again in the White House. The narrative slows down to reveal the events of a single day where Alice must fix a problem that has arisen from her past and deal with an anti-war protester camping out in front of the White House.

Earlier in the novel on page 321, Alice muses that "being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.”

But had it made her unafraid? She seems somewhat afraid to face the contradictions of her own marriage. Although she’s a Democrat married to a Republican, a pro-choicer married to a conservative Christian, an anti-war sympathizer married to a Commander in Chief, these contradictions are kept under wraps through her terse comments to the press and focus on causes such as literacy rather than forays into more controversial policy. When she finally does reveal her true beliefs on the controversial issues, she threatens not only her husband, her own source of vibrancy, but a presidency.

Sittenfeld’s success in creating a plausible narrator and realistic supporting cast of characters from Miss Ruby, the Blackwell’s housekeeper, to Snowflake, the White House cat, tempts one to wonder how realistic is this fiction. And in doing so, we become much more sympathetic to the plight of those in positions of power, not necessarily the politicians, but the wives, mothers, and even readers. We after all have the power to decide if Alice is passive or prudent, mousy or mysterious. And we may choose to consider Charlie charming or vexing, well-meaning or just well-off. And in deliberating these fictional characters, one is tempted to reexamine their counterparts in real life. As a result, we may find more empathy than anger, more curiosity than cringing.

Hear Curtis Sittenfeld talking about her work on Fresh Air. Look for the link under References.