Well. Going into this novel, I didn't know anything about it. I picked it up because I had read Sittenfeld's [b:Prep|9844|Prep A Novel|Curtis Sittenfeld|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166071934s/9844.jpg|2317177]. When I spoke with others about it, I found that they had heard it was loosely based on Laura Bush's life. I had no idea, and I don't really know anything about her life, so it was interesting to read. I read most of it on my flight to Seattle. It's not something I'd read again, but I did enjoy it. ( )

Really enjoyed this, an ambitious attempt to tell the story of one life over several decades.
Good on growing up in the 50s and how stifling society still was then.
It also made me think about how we just don't know where we're going to end up - until she met her husband (which happens well into the book), she never thought she'd be in public life.
At times, she is so passive that I wanted to strangle her.
Still a fantastic read. ( )

great read ( )

It's hard to separate the fiction of the book from the reality of the person, but read as fiction, this was great. Sittenfeld does a good job of creating a fully realized person. Whether that person is the same as her real-life counterpart, I have no idea, but I don't really care. I did find myself thinking what Laura Bush would have thought of the book, though I suspect she wouldn't have cared for the sex scenes (I can't imagine reading about yourself having sex. Very strange.) But the book stayed with me for several days; I found myself thinking over various scenes, always a godo sign. ( )

During the George W. Bush years, I knew quite a few smart, liberal women who were fascinated by Laura Bush. How could this apparently intelligent woman, a librarian and former teacher, be with this crude, loutish frat boy turned politician?

I didn’t share this fascination with Laura, or with the Bushes and their odd-couple marriage. Even one’s friends’ marriages are pretty inscrutable, let alone the marriages of prominent people one doesn’t actually know. My distaste for the 43rd president was political—I didn’t care about his personal life, one way or the other. But Curtis Sittenfeld’s previous books, "Prep" and "The Man of My Dreams," were both a lot better than a plot summary of either would suggest. So in spite of myself, I was curious, and willing to give "American Wife" a chance.

Still, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to sustain my interest in these characters for 500-plus pages. So I’m happy to say that Sittenfeld, once again, didn’t disappoint. Her first-person narrator, Alice Lindgren, is not just a stand-in for the former First Lady—you don’t have to keep Laura Bush’s Wikipedia entry open as a crib sheet while you read. No, Alice is a fully developed character, interesting in her own right even if (like me) you’ve never bothered to delve very deeply into Laura Bush’s back-story.

In the early chapters, we get to know Alice and her family, including her unconventional grandmother, whose room, “smelling of cigarette smoke and Shalimar,” seems to Alice to be “a passageway to adventure, the lobby of adulthood.” Then we come to the pivotal event of Alice’s youth—an auto accident in which, at 17, she is responsible for the death of a boy she has just begun to love. It’s not hard to see why JFK’s assassination, coming just a few months later, would give her “a grim relief”—something “so dreadful, it eclipsed the dreadfulness of what I had caused.”

By the time Alice meets Charlie Blackwell, we can see why she is ready to embrace the life of “larks and mischief” that he seems to offer her, with Charlie himself as Alice’s “own personal tour guide in the country of good fortune.” By now, we know Alice well enough to understand how she manages to maintain her attraction to Charlie even as she comes to see a less appealing side of his large, wealthy, ambitious, and often crude family. (In one vignette, Charlie’s mother—nicknamed Maj, for “Majesty”—casually tells him, “That haircut makes you look like a Jew.”)

But like most of us, Alice discovers that she is able to hold two opposite views at the same time. Her “jealous wonder” at the Blackwells' “clannish energy” coexists with a sense of gratitude for her own “calm and quiet” upbringing. “So many inside jokes for the Blackwells to keep track of,” Alice reflects, “so many nicknames …, so much one-upmanship: Surely I was not the only one who found it tiring.” And we agree, even as (like Alice) we also find it oddly compelling.

Alice’s mixed feelings come to the fore on her first visit to Halcyon, the Wisconsin retreat where the Blackwells engage in a “false secretive form of roughing it,” which Sittenfeld evokes deftly through Alice’s dry parenthetical observations: “(Oh, but how they loved their one toilet, how they loved their faded furniture and mossy, rickety dock, their chipped saucers and tarnished picture frames and hard mattresses….)” As the years go on, and Alice and Charlie settle into a life centered largely on Charlie’s political career, Sittenfeld nicely captures the feeling of “home” that a long marriage, even a deeply flawed one, can provide.

The final section, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closely parallels recent history (except for a few plot twists that have been set in motion much earlier). These later chapters have a perfunctory quality, but on the whole, I was happy to have Charlie’s road to the presidency encapsulated in a brief, efficient bit of exposition, beginning, “This is the part everyone already knows,” and concluding, “Some of those who were once his defenders have become his critics.”

By this point in the story, those critics include Alice—regardless of what the real Laura Bush may or may not have felt. And by this point, too, I’d had quite enough of Charlie Blackwell, even if Alice doesn't share that view. Likewise, I haven’t felt a shred of nostalgia for the Bush years, though reading "American Wife" did (mildly) pique my interest in learning a little more about Laura. But more than that, what stayed with me was the story of Alice Lindgren—a more reliable, and far more interesting, narrator than I’d been expecting. ( )