The intensely private, reserved Laura Bush might seem a surprising choice for the subject of a 570-page confessional novel. But the sad story of Laura's accident at 17, when she ran a stop sign in Midland, Texas, and killed a high school romantic interest, is literary catnip to a writer who feasts on adolescent angst. Sittenfeld could also identify with Laura’s passion for literature. And who can resist wondering how the Bushes’ beauty-and-the-beast, lady-and-the-tramp marriage works? What does Laura really think of her husband?
As Maureen Dowd noted in a July 9 New York Times op-ed column defending "American Wife" against early attacks that it's all "smear" and "gossip," "There's only one vessel that can ferry you past Laura's moat, and that's fiction." The difficulty for the Bushes is that some readers may mistake Sittenfeld's fiction for biography.
Charlie Blackwell, her stand-in for George W. Bush, is an uninhibited, grinning, crude, but amiable goofball whose "ambitions exceed his talent." Alice Lindgren Blackwell, her stand-in for Laura, fares better. But Sittenfeld, who used graphic sex scenes in her first two novels to contrast healthy relationships with bad ones, gets into bed with her characters again. Beyond the inherent prurience of imagining the first lady's premarital sex life, it's a stretch to believe that this reserved character would include such details in a narrative, even to herself.
Alice's voice is modest and refined. Her story is divided into four neat sections, each headed by the address where she lived at the time. The first three are in her home state of Wisconsin; Sittenfeld, an Ohio native, chose a Midwestern state in place of Texas. The prologue and final section are set at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
