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American Wife: A Novel (New York Times Notable Books) |  | Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  248 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: X
Pages: 568
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0812975405
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780812975406
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| • | ISBN13: 9780812975406 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
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 withâand that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husbandâs presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 248
 Loved it September 3, 2008
B. Lee (Houston, Texas, USA)
69 out of 90 found this review helpful
Great summaries in the other reviews - I won't repeat those.
I loved the beginning and middle of this book. Loved Alice, her childhood, her growing up experiences, her family, her life as a single woman, her courtships, her experiences with the Blackwell family (these were my favorite sections), and her relationship with her husband, the future president. All of these things are plot lines that Sittenfeld wrote BRILLIANTLY.
When I finished reading this book, however, I was lukewarm about the ending. 2 weeks later, when I was still thinking about the book, I realized how fervently it had stuck with me, and have since decided that it was one of my favorites of 2008 so far.
Great work, Curtis. I praise your boldness and your talent for writing about women in a sometimes awkward and uncomfortable but always honest fashion. Definitely worth the read.
True art. A nuanced portrait of how it feels to be the wife of a major political figure, or any celebrity September 11, 2008
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
26 out of 34 found this review helpful
Let's get this out of the way up front: If AMERICAN WIFE were nothing more than a barely disguised attempt to imagine and illuminate the inner life of Laura Bush, it might be entertaining in a titillating sort of way, but hardly worth more attention than a quickly forgotten magazine profile. In truth, Curtis Sittenfeld's third novel is a rich and arresting portrait of an enduring marriage, of the inevitable compromises necessary to reach that longevity, and of the unremitting demands of public life and the price of fame.
Sittenfeld's protagonist, Alice Lindgren, is born in a small Wisconsin town in 1946, the only child of a bank manager and a housewife. Her early years are unremarkable until a September night in 1963 when the car she's driving on the way to a party collides with one driven by Andrew Imhof, a classmate with whom she's moving toward a relationship. Andrew is killed, and the specter of his loss shadows Alice's waking (and dreaming) life.
Alice falls into a relationship with Andrew's older brother, Pete, and when she becomes pregnant, her grandmother takes her to Chicago for an abortion --- a decision that plays a central role in the novel's denouement.
Sittenfeld fast forwards to Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, where Alice contentedly works as an elementary school librarian and dreams about buying a house. During a summer when she's spending most of her time creating papier-mâchécharacters to decorate the library, she meets Charlie Blackwell, "someone who found his own flaws endearing and thus concealed nothing," at a backyard barbecue. Charlie is the youngest of four sons of Harold and Priscilla (nicknamed "Maj," short for "Majesty") Blackwell. Harold is a former governor of Wisconsin and unsuccessful candidate for president in 1968, and the family owns a prosperous meatpacking business. Two of Charlie's brothers work alongside him in the business, while one serves in Congress. But, as Charlie puts it, "Being a Blackwell is my full-time job."
At first, Alice --- a registered Democrat with liberal political sympathies --- is put off ("money and Republicans and sausage did not strike me as a particularly tempting combination."). But within six weeks, she and Charlie are engaged, and six weeks later they're married. On the surface it's an unlikely match: Alice is bright, self-aware and witty, an inveterate reader of serious novelists like Bellow and Nabokov, while Charlie prefers to spend his evenings with a beer and pretzels, stretched out on the couch watching a baseball game. The mystery of romantic love is on display here in all its oddity.
Charlie's first foray into electoral politics as a candidate for Congress in 1978 results in a crushing defeat, and he retreats philosophically into the family business and life of a prosperous Milwaukee suburbanite. Ten years later, he's a disgruntled 42-year-old, obsessed (to Alice's annoyance) by his "legacy." An offer to become a part owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and the public face of the team as its managing partner appears it may be enough to relieve his lethargy. But before long, he's spending more of his time in increasingly frequent drinking bouts and behavioral lapses that move Alice to threaten divorce, especially after they attend a disastrous 20th reunion of Charlie's Princeton class. Alice's ultimatum abruptly ends Charlie's drinking, and he undergoes a religious conversion at the hands of an evangelical preacher, Reverend Randy. Soon, he is elected governor of Wisconsin and is on the fast track to the White House. Still, Alice is ambivalent: "I wanted Charlie to win the election," she comments wryly, "but I didn't want him to be president."
The final quarter of the book is set in June 2007. Blackwell, nearing the end of his second term, presides over an unpopular Middle East war, while trying to gain Supreme Court confirmation of a staunchly anti-abortion female judge. Alice, pro-choice and skeptical about the war, must face the contradictions in her public and interior lives --- and she does so in a moving and completely authentic fashion.
The well-known elements of the Bush story all are here, subtly altered to present them in a fresh and original way. But no writer, even one as adept as Curtis Sittenfeld, will ever unearth anything approaching the objective truth of George and Laura Bush's relationship. What she has done, and what elevates this book to the realm of true art, is to create a nuanced portrait of how it feels to be the wife of a major political figure, or indeed any celebrity. Fulfilling Hemingway's definition of a good story, AMERICAN WIFE feels "more true than what really happened." That's the highest compliment one can pay to this thoroughly absorbing novel.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
A thought provoking read. September 6, 2008
Jill Meyer (Santa Fe, NM)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful
"American Wife" is a huge, juicy, wonderful novel. Obviously based on the life of Laura Welch Bush, Sittenfeld extrapolates from Bush's biography a "back story". It's probably wishful thinking that makes Sittenfeld have her Laura Bush/Alice Blackwell character do in the last chapter the one thing that the real Laura Bush has never done in "real life".
But if Sittenfeld makes free with the ending, she does bring life to Charlie Blackwell and his wife Alice. We see what may have been the attraction between the real George Bush and his wife.
I enjoyed this book and, while long, never bored me in the least.
Sadly, Some People Will See this Book for What it's Not September 30, 2008
Zachary Hackett (Reno, Nevada)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm not familiar with Laura Bush's history, never felt I had to be. I'm not a big fan of GWB, but I'm a huge fan of Laura's, but how she got to be the way she is, what molded her, her dreams, ambitions, the sort of stuff you find in those magazines by the supermarket checkout stand, those sort of things I tend to ignore. I pretty much accept people, the famous and the not famous, the way they are, their private lives should remain private. That's what I believe anyway.
That said, I did know Laura Bush was in an auto accident when she was in high school and that somebody had perished. The facts I didn't know. I also knew she'd married a guy who became president. And other than her style and grace, that's about all I knew about Laura.
I didn't know Ms. Sittenfeld had loosely based this book on Laura's life when I started it. Duh! How could I have been so dense, it's been on the news that a book based in the first lady's life was out there, but I didn't made the connection. I did connect pretty quickly once I started the book and met First Lady Alice Blackwell, who is wondering about the choices she's made as she's thinking about the Iraq War and her war-like president husband.
This was the book! Had I known, I probably would have passed, but I'd been drawn in, so I kept on reading about Alice as she goes over her life, from that accident when she'd killed the man (boy really) who would be a part of her forever. How she slept with his brutish brother as a sort of penance, how she got pregnant, had an abortion, loved her lesbian grandmother, met and married a dimwitted, conservative Republican from a clannish family. How she compromised her ideals, molded her life to fit his.
Does Laura think her husband is the dimwitted, war-mongering, born again kind of clown Alice sees in her husband? I doubt it. Ms. Sittenfeld may have some of the facts right, even if she has moved Texas to Wisconsin, but one look at Laura Bush's style and grace and you can tell Curtis Sittenfeld's got the character all wrong, Laura's character, that's the character she's missed the ball with. Alice's character, that's a horse of a different color. Ms. Sittenfeld has nailed Alice. She's built her from the ground up, made her real, made her someone you care about, but just Alice Blackwell is not Laura Bush.
This is fiction. It's good fiction, but sadly, I think too many people are going to see this book for what it's not.
Page turner & eye opening May 14, 2009
chitownfish (Chicago IL)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I loved this book and had trouble putting it down. The main character was complex and very real. Somehow, all at once, she was thinking, confident, intelligent, worldy, liberal, sexual and nurturing while also being reserved, desperate, conflicted, passive, conservative, naive and uptight. These traits made her sympathetic, something I didn't feel for the main character in Prep (I probably would have rated that book 3 stars - although it was good, it left me with an "icky" feeling). The author's characterization of Bush actually made me like him MORE (and even feel oddly attracted to him). Overall, I saw this as a story of a marriage between two complex and ultimately shockingly infuential people. It made me much more intrigued with the real Laura Bush and want to learn more about her. I accept that this is a completely fictionalized account of Laura's life, but can see how conservatives wouldn't like to read this. I am still thinking about the book and characters several weeks after reading it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 248
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