Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Woodburn Public Library | Sittenfeld | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Salem Main Library | LP Sittenfeld, C. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House-and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, almost in opposition to itself.
A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice learned the virtues of politeness early on from her stolid parents and small Wisconsin hometown. But a tragic accident when she was seventeen shattered her identity and made her understand the fragility of life and the tenuousness of luck. So more than a decade later, when she met boisterous, charismatic Charlie Blackwell, she hardly gave him a second look: She was serious and thoughtful, and he would rather crack a joke than offer a real insight; he was the wealthy son of a bastion family of the Republican party, and she was a school librarian and registered Democrat. Comfortable in her quiet and unassuming life, she felt inured to his charms. And then, much to her surprise, Alice fell for Charlie.
As Alice learns to make her way amid the clannish energy and smug confidence of the Blackwell family, navigating the strange rituals of their country club and summer estate, she remains uneasy with her newfound good fortune. And when Charlie eventually becomes President, Alice is thrust into a position she did not seek-one of power and influence, privilege and responsibility. As Charlie's tumultuous and controversial second term in the White House wears on, Alice must face contradictions years in the making: How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her privatebeliefs run against her public persona?
In Alice Blackwell, New York Times bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic and complex heroine yet. American Wife is a gorgeously written novel that weaves class, wealth, race, and the exigencies of fate into a brilliant tapestry-a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable, and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare. Praise for American Wife
Curtis Sittenfeld is an amazing writer, and American Wife is a brave and moving novel about the intersection of private and public life in America. Ambitious and humble at the same time, Sittenfeld refuses to trivialize or simplify people, whether real or imagined.
-Richard Russo
What a remarkable (and brave) thing: a compassionate, illuminating, and beautifully rendered portrait of a fictional Republican first lady with a life and husband very much like our actual Republican first lady's. Curtis Sittenfeld has written a novel as impressive as it is improbable.
-Kurt Andersen From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld was born August 23, 1975 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is an American writer. Her titles include: Prep, the tale of a Massachusetts prep school; The Man of My Dreams, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love; and American Wife, a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush.
Sittenfeld attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 2018 she made the bestseller list with her title, You Think It, I'll Say It.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sittenfeld tracks, in her uneven third novel, the life of bookish, naïve Alice Lindgren and the trajectory that lands her in the White House as first lady. Charlie Blackwell, her boyishly charming rake of a husband, whose background of Ivy League privilege, penchant for booze and partying, contempt for the news and habit of making flubs when speaking off the cuff, bears more than a passing resemblance to the current president (though the Blackwells hail from Wisconsin, not Texas). Sittenfeld shines early in her portrayal of Alice's coming-of-age in Riley, Wis., living with her parents and her mildly eccentric grandmother. A car accident in her teens results in the death of her first crush, which haunts Alice even as she later falls for Charlie and becomes overwhelmed by his family's private summer compound and exclusive country club membership. Once the author leaves the realm of pure fiction, however, and has the first couple deal with his being ostracized as a president who favors an increasingly unpopular war, the book quickly loses its panache and sputters to a weak conclusion that doesn't live up to the fine storytelling that precedes it. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An elementary-school librarian marries the least promising son of an old-moneyed, intensely competitive Republican family and sticks by him as he rises from hard-drinking fool to unpopular U.S. President in this roman à clef from Sittenfeld (The Man of My Dreams, 2006, etc.). In the involving, richly imagined first section of the book, set in Wisconsin rather than Texas, narrator Alice spends a charmed middle-class girlhood with loving parents and a devoted grandmother, an iconoclast who introduces Alice to the joys of literature, among other things. Then, as a teen, virginal Alice runs a stop sign, hits another car and causes the death of the very boy she was on her way to meet at a party. In confused grief she sleeps with his older brother and has an abortion. There is a lot of melodrama, but Sittenfeld's understated style works well to bring home Alice's loss of innocence. Unfortunately, once Charlie Blackwell comes on the scene to tie Alice awkwardly to semi-accurate facts, the story becomes a plodding, predictable series of close encounters with the factual history of a family Americans already know well: Charlie's white-haired, overbearing mother and genuinely decent dad; Charlie's devotion to baseball and his stint as the owner of a baseball team; Charlie's hard drinking; Charlie's Christian conversion after Alice threatens to leave him; Charlie's limited mental faculties but soaring ambition; Charlie's Machiavellian handler who steers his political fortunes. Once Charlie rises to President and wages a war she questions, Alice faces a new (presumably fictional) crisis of conscience. While deciding whether to meet the protesting father of a dead soldier, Alice muses unconvincingly on the insularity of fame, the role of the media and her own responsibility for her husband's failed policies. What draws bookish Democrat Alice to Charlie--and what keeps her his barely questioning helpmate--is how cute he is, despite those squinty eyes, along with his dependence and adoration. This fictional first lady is a wimp and her husband a lightweight. So what's new? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her bold third novel, the author of the best-selling Prep (2005) presents a fictional portrait of First Lady Laura Bush, although she changes some important details. In a memoir told entirely in the first person, Alice Blackwell relays her unlikely ascent to the White House from her humble Wisconsin beginnings. She conveys in convincing, thoroughly riveting detail a life far more complicated than it appears on the surface the moment she discovered that her beloved grandmother was a lesbian; a tragic, life-changing car accident she had as a teenager; the friendship she willingly sacrificed with her best friend when she started dating the good-humored, athletic Charlie Blackwell; and her uncomfortable initiation into the tight-knit, immensely wealthy Blackwell family, run with unflappable authority by its formidable matriarch. No one is more surprised than Alice when her hard-drinking, sports-team-owning husband morphs into a born-again Christian with political ambitions. Suddenly, Alice's life is no longer her own as her every move is parsed for its political implications. Sittenfeld is sure to come under fire for presuming to so methodically blur the lines between fiction and reality and for timing her novel's publication to an election year for maximum publicity. Yet what she does here, in prose as winning as it is confident, is to craft out of the first-person narration a compelling, very human voice, one full of kindness and decency. And, as if making the Bush-like couple entirely sympathetic is not enough of a feat in itself, she also provides many rich insights into the emotional ebb and flow of a long-term marriage.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Is there a distinctly American experience? "The American," by Henry James; "An American Tragedy," by Theodore Dreiser; "The Quiet American," by Graham Greene; "The Ugly American," by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick; Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" and Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho" - each suggests, in its very title, a mythic dimension in which fictitious characters are intended to represent national types or predilections. Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that "American" is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which "good" and "evil" are mysteriously conjoined; to be an "American" is to be a kind of pilgrim, an archetypal seeker after truth. Though destined to be thwarted, even defeated, the pilgrim is our deepest and purest American self. The young heroines of Curtis Sittenfeld's previous novels "Prep" and "The Man of My Dreams," like the more mature protagonist of Sittenfeld's third and most ambitious novel, "American Wife," are sister-variants of the American outsider, the excluded, disadvantaged, often envious and obsessive observer of others' seemingly privileged lives. Much acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2005, the tersely titled "Prep" is not a brilliantly corrosive adolescent cri de coeur like J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," still less a powerful indictment of conformist American racist society like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," but an unassuming coming-of-age memoirist fiction tracing the adventures and misadventures of a Midwestern girl, Lee Fiora, whose good fortune - unless it's her misfortune - is to be a scholarship student at a prestigious New England prep school called Ault. By her own definition a girl of no more than average intelligence, looks and personality, Lee is yet a sharp-eyed observer of the WASP prep-school milieu, and of her own chronically forlorn presence there; unlike her prep-school predecessor Holden Caulfield, Lee is not a rebel, but one who unabashedly envies, admires and wishes to adulate her more glamorous classmates. If Lee Fiora is a 21st-century American-girl pilgrim of sorts, her quest isn't for a searing and illuminating truth but a girl's wish to be "popular" with her peers and to be noticed - to be kissed - by the boy of her dreams, Cross Sugarman: "I was, of course, obsessed with kissing; I thought of kissing instead of thinking of Spanish verbs, instead of reading the newspaper or writing letters to my parents. ... But ... kissing terrified me, as an actual thing you did with another person, and there was no one it would be more humiliating to kiss badly than Cross." "Prep" is perhaps most notable for its refusal to make of its protagonist a figure in any way "heroic" - her angst is petty, small-minded, but utterly convincing. The "American wife" of Sittenfeld's new novel, conspicuously modeled after the life of Laura Bush as recorded in Ann Gerhart's biography "The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush" (2004), is a fictitious first lady named Alice Blackwell, née Lindgren, a Wisconsin-born former grade school teacher and librarian who comes belatedly to realize, in middle age, at the height of the Iraq war that her aggressively militant president-husband has initiated and stubbornly continues to defend, that she has compromised her youthful liberal ideals: "I lead a life in opposition to itself." As a portraitist in prose, Sittenfeld never deviates from sympathetic respect for her high-profile subject: she is not Francis Bacon but rather more Norman Rockwell. Nearness to the White House and the egomaniacal possibilities of presidential power have not inspired this novelist to wild flights of surreal satire as in the brilliantly executed Nixon-inspired fictions of a bygone era, Philip Roth's "Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends)" (1971) and Robert Coover's "Public Burning" (1977). There are no stylistic innovations in "American Wife" and very little that is political or even historical. Sittenfeld's prose here is straightforward and unobtrusive, lacking even the wry asides of the girl-narrators of "Prep" and "The Man of My Dreams," whose powers of observation are sharpened by their chronic low-grade depression; Alice is never other than "good" - "selfless" - stricken by conscience as she looks back upon the life that has become mysterious and problematic to her, like a life lived by someone not herself: "Was I mutable, without a fixed identity? I could see the arguments for every side, for and against people like the Blackwells" (her husband Charlie's wealthy, politically influential family). "Charlie ... had told me I had a strong sense of myself, but I wondered then if the opposite was true - if what he took for strength was a bending sort of accommodation to his ways." For much of its considerable length, "American Wife" seems to be, on the whole, a faithful dramatization of the life of the "perfect wife" portrayed in Gerhart's well-written and "balanced" biography: Alice Lindgren is intelligent, thoughtful, inclined to be reserved and slightly prudish, a lover of books and libraries, conventional in her devout middle-class Christian upbringing - "Good manners meant accommodating the person you were with" - who, as a girl of 17, accidentally causes the death of a high school classmate, a boy to whom she is romantically attracted, by running a stop sign at a darkened rural intersection and crashing into his car. Alice, like her real-life model Laura Bush, who had a similar accident as a girl of 17 in 1963 in her hometown, Midland, Tex., is not charged with any infraction of the law; but the death of this classmate reverberates through the novel, like a subterranean stream of repressed passion, an abiding guilt and an inconsolable sorrow: "Andrew died, I caused his death, and then, like a lover, I took him inside me." (Questioned about this incident by journalists, Alice Blackwell repeats verbatim the carefully chosen words in which Laura Bush replies when confronted with similar questions.) "American Wife" is a romance in which the dead, lost lover prevails over the living husband, no matter that the living husband is president of the United States, as, at the novel's end, the 61-year-old Alice concedes that, for all that she has been the "perfect" wife to Charlie Blackwell, it has always been the dead Andrew whom she has loved, in secret: "That dewy certainty I felt for Andrew, the lightness of our lives then - it is long gone. I have never experienced it with anyone else." An idealistic grammar-school librarian of 31 when she is introduced to Charlie Blackwell and finds herself vigorously courted by him - as, she will later learn, "marriage material for a rising star of the Republican Party" - Alice is initially overwhelmed by the crude, bullying, overbearing wealthy Blackwell clan into which it seems to be her destiny to marry: "It came to me so naturally, such a casual reaction - I hate it here," Alice thinks miserably as a houseguest at her fiance's family's summer home in northern Wisconsin, a kind of nightmare boot camp where outsiders like Alice are initiated into the Blackwells' tight-knit, fiercely loyal way of life. The mystery of Alice's life - as it is the prevailing mystery of Laura Bush's life, seen from the outside - is the wife's seemingly unquestioned allegiance to a husband with values very different from her own, if not in mockery of her own. From the start, though attracted to Charlie Blackwell as a genial, charming presence, Alice also recognizes him as "churlish," a "spoiled lightweight," "undeniably handsome, but ... cocky in a way I didn't like," shallow, egotistical, "some sort of dimwit," an "aspiring politician from a smug and ribald family, ... a man who basically ... did not hold a job" and who will demand of her an unswerving devotion to his efforts: "Alice, loyalty is everything to my family. There's nothing more important. Someone insults a Blackwell, and that's it. ... I don't try to convince people. I cut them off." HERE in embryo is the right-wing Republican's chilling partisan-political strategy, which is repellant to Alice even as - seemingly helplessly, with a female sort of acquiescence in her fate - she acknowledges feeling a "sprawling, enormous happiness" with him that sweeps all rational doubts aside: Charlie "was all breeziness and good cheer; when I was talking to him, the world did not seem like such a complicated place." Yet more pointedly, as the first lady thinks well into the president's second term: Charlie "always reminds me ... of an actor going onstage, an insurance salesman or perhaps the owner of the hardware store who landed the starring role in the community-theater production of 'The Music Man.' Oh, how I want to protect him! Oh, the outlandishness of our lives, familiar now and routine, but still so deeply strange. 'I love you, too,' I say." Though "American Wife" is respectful of the first lady, its portrait of the president is rather more mixed, cartoonish: chilling, too, in its combination of steely indifference to opposing political viewpoints and crude frat-boy humor: "'See, that's what makes America great - room for all kinds of opposing viewpoints,'" Charlie says to Alice. She continues: "I can tell Charlie's grinning, then I hear an unmistakable noise, a bubbly blurt of sound, and I know he's just broken wind. Though I've told him it's inconsiderate, I think he does it as much as possible in front of his agents. He'll say, 'They think it's hilarious when the leader of the free world toots his own horn!'" Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious - or so presumptuous - as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet "American Wife" might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the "American wife" is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections - the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide "love" excuses all. Criticized for abjuring responsibility for her husband's destructive political policies, Alice reacts defensively: "The single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people. Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true - it's staggering." And, more provocatively: What "caught me by surprise was how the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie's cultivation of a war-president persona." Her challenge to the American public: "All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power." "American Wife" is most engaging in its early chapters, when Alice Lindgren isn't yet Alice Blackwell but an insecure young woman, haunted by the memory of the beautiful boy she'd accidentally killed as a girl yet dedicated to teaching and to a life defined by books. After she meets Charlie Blackwell and becomes his helpmeet, her independence swallowed up in his ambition, Alice seems to lose definition and, especially in the novel's final, weakest section, titled "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," to become a generic figure of celebrity proffering bromides to an adulatory public - "Gradually your fame settles on you, it's like a new coat or a new car that you become used to" and irritably defending herself against the prying media - "I don't ooze sincerity. I am sincere." At the novel's end, Sittenfeld breaks from the Laura Bush biographies to imagine for her first lady a belated gesture of rebellion regarding the Iraq war that yields but a muted air of conviction. IF there is an American gothic tale secreted within "American Wife," it's one of unconscionable, even criminal behavior cloaked in the reassuring tones of the domestic; political tragedy reduced to the terms of situation comedy, in this way nullified, erased. How to take Charlie Blackwell seriously as a purveyor of evil? We can't, not as we see him through his wife's indulgent eyes smiling "as he does when he's broken wind particularly loudly, as if he's half sheepish and half pleased with himself." The ideal American wife can only retreat into a kind of female solace of opacity: "For now I will say nothing; amid the glaring exposure, there must remain secrets that are mine alone." 'American Wife' is a romance in which the lost lover prevails over the living husband - the president. Joyce Carol Oates is the author, most recently, of the novel "My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike" and the story collection "Wild Nights!"
Library Journal Review
Another hit for Sittenfeld after Prep and The Man of My Dreams? Here, unassuming Alice Blackwell goes from small-town girl to First Lady. With a ten-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.