American Wife

I just returned from a two-week vacation, where I had plenty of plane and beach time for reading! My ideal plane/beach read is something that is captivating and complex enough to hold my interest, but not too complicated or heavy, since I'll be frequently interrupted. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld was perfect!

It's supposed to be a novelization of Laura Bush's life, but it is first and foremost a novel. The similarities are there--she marries the wild son of a political family who buys a baseball team and later becomes president. But it's a literary telling of her life, with a couple of incidents--killing someone in a car accident and an abortion as a teen--that become linchpins for everything that follows. (The car accident actually happened, but the abortion is pure fiction.) She doesn't always agree with her husband's political views, but she sticks by him and is--mostly--supportive.

The coverage of Bush's presidential years center around the protests of Cindy Sheehan--except in the book it's a bereft father who camps out in Washington, hoping the President will meet with him. Flashbacks cover other events--the election controversies, 9/11--but it is the war and his handling of the war that receive the most attention. Which, really, is in line with Bush's legacy as currently viewed.

The Blackwell family in the novel isn't nearly as powerful as the real-life Bush family. His father was merely a governor, not a president, and his brother a member of congress. I thought that was a strange choice, since living up to or surpassing his father's presidential legacy was such an important component in other Bush made-up biographies, especially the Oliver Stone movie.

In any case, whether you choose to focus on the Bush parallels or take it at face value as a piece of fiction, this is an absorbing novel and perfect for vacation reading. I got through two more novels, which I'll post about shortly!