American Wife: A Novel | 
| Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Publisher: Random House
List Price: $26.00
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You Save: $14.00 (54%)
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Rating:  129 reviews
Sales Rank: 724
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400064759
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781400064755
ASIN: 1400064759
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Dust cover wrinkled-otherwise great shape.
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Product Description
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 private beliefs 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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 124 more reviews...
 "What was she thinking?" October 7, 2008
Ashley Megan (Vernon, CT United States)
35 out of 44 found this review helpful
It's nearly impossible to separate your feelings about "American Wife" and the character of Alice Blackwell from your feelings about the book's inspiration, Laura Bush. Although the book is probably at least 80% fiction, the parallels are impossible to ignore, and they naturally color every aspect of the reading experience. Every reader is going to bring in preconceptions - admiration, frustration, anger, pity, or just plain confusion - and expect this book to either confirm or explain what they think they know about our current first lady.
But while recognizing my own bias, I tried - I really tried - to be as objective as possible. In some places - particularly the first two parts of the book - it was easier than others. At other times, keeping an open mind became an almost exhaustive task. Nevertheless, it's one I'm glad to have undertaken. "American Wife" succeeds on both levels: as a standalone book about one woman's rather interesting life, and as a speculative character study about a women most of us will probably never truly understand.
Alice Blackwell is a study in contradictions. She's an intelligent women who goes out of her way to make sure she never has to think for herself. She's almost aggressively passive, a woman who seems to want to make as little impression on the world as possible, and yet one of her first acts as an independent adult is to take another human being's life in a car accident. She's a Democrat who marries into a staunchly political Republican family. You like her, but at the same time you veer between pitying her and wanting to smack her back to her senses. As such, she makes for a fascinating, but ultimately frustrating, main character.
The other main stand-in in "American Wife," of course, is Charlie Blackwell, the incompetent younger son who stumbles his way into Alice's heart and eventually the White House. Personally, I don't think Sittenfeld went far enough in drawing the parallels between Charlie and W., but maybe that's just me. We gain little insight into their relationship, and we never really know what they see in each other (except perhaps desperation on Alice's part - unmarried into her 30s, you can't escape the idea that she honestly feels she can't do any better). Their daughter Ella is likewise obtuse - after a jump from Ella at age 8 to age 28, we might as well be looking at a complete stranger in the final quarter of the book.
The characters who do stand out are the bit players in Alice's life, those who never became public figures and are thus wholly new to us. Chief among these is her grandmother Emilie. I would have happily read an entire book about this woman's life - calling a feisty older woman a "firecracker" may be a cliche, but here it's entirely appropriate. She's a scream, and the book brightened immensely whenever she made an appearance. Alice's childhood friend Dena undergoes several metamorphoses over the course of the book, finally redeeming herself in the final chapters in a quietly satisfying way.
I truly enjoyed "American Wife" as a novel. As a character study, it probably raised more questions than it answered; moreover, I worry that readers will become too obsessed with drawing parallels and wondering where the line between fact and fiction has been drawn. Sittenfeld has done a marvelous job creating a complex, complicated protagonist and inviting us to attempt an answer to that question, "What was she thinking?"
 Left me cold August 28, 2008
M. DeMassa (Connecticut)
31 out of 44 found this review helpful
I received the book American Wife as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. It is the latest novel by Prep: A Novel author Curtis Sittenfeld and draws on the life of Laura Bush for much of the formation of the main characters and events. It is a long and detailed story of how a reserved (but not conservative), intelligent woman ended up the wife of the President of the United States.
The books starts off strong with a compelling description of teenage life in the early 1960s in middle America. I was drawn in by the dramatic events of most of the first part and quite interested to see how these events would shape and drive this young woman -- as I was sure they would.
I will admit I was not a big fan of Prep. I wanted very much to like it and by the description it sounded very much like a book I would definitely like, but it had one fatal flaw -- the main character. I had no empathy or even sympathy for her. American Wife suffers from the same problem. I can't find many reasons to warm up to Alice. She's so reserved and so rigid and so downright prissy that I just couldn't care about her. I can't help thinking that Ms. Sittenfeld was so afraid of having her novel referred to as "chick lit" that she stripped out all the humor, all the passion and all the foibles of Alice -- in other words all the things that make us root for the women who star in all those "chick lit" novels. If I could have cared about Alice more, and rooted for her then this story might have been a lot more human.
Alice never really overcomes, she never really shows passion and she doesn't even stand behind her husband or her own convictions. So, for me, the book, like Alice herself, slowly stagnates after the first part. If Alice had been passionate about her husband, rather than accepting, had thrown herself into supporting him, or thrown herself into motherhood or really anything it would have been a much more interesting story. Instead we ended up with story of how a rather stilted woman came to be. For Laura Bush's sake I hope the similarities between her life and Alice's are limited to the major events only.
 Loved it September 3, 2008
B. Lee (Houston, Texas, USA)
31 out of 35 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.
marvelous fictional re-creation of a First Lady August 27, 2008
Richard Cumming (blue state)
25 out of 37 found this review helpful
There was a sense of apprehension about this book. It has gotten a lot of advance publicity. Articles in the press said that it was a thinly disguised story about the real First Lady, Laura Bush.
Curtis Sittenfeld was quoted as saying that it is 85% fiction with the remainder based upon that real person's life. It's fiction for obvious reasons. She made up all the conversations.
The book opens as our future First Lady, Alice Blackwell is growing up in Wisconsin. (substitute Wisconsin for Texas). The signature event in her younger days is a tragic car accident where the boy she loved is killed. This creates a chain of events that haunts Alice throughout the book.
She becomes a librarian and meets the aspiring politician Charlie Blackwell. He is the scion of a wealthy political dynasty in Wisconsin. They made their fortune in meat. (substitute meat for oil,etc.)
This unlikely pair falls in love. There's sex in this book. It's written in a very realistic style from Alice's point of view. Charlie drinks a lot. That's a problem. He makes the famous decision to embrace his family and Christianity while spurning the booze.
And he's on his way to the highest office in the land. Sittenfeld pulls out some wonderful surprises in this clever and enchanting book. Her First Lady comes off the page as a real person. We like her a lot. Charlie comes off like W - amusing, closed-minded, profane.
This book will be huge, bigger than PREP was for the author.
 Good start, uneven finish... September 1, 2008
Ann Spencer (Carmel, CA)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful
I was really looking forward to this book and it started with promise. The reader is introduced to young Alice Lindgren, and we follow her from an unlikely beginning to finally becoming First Lady. She loses her first love in a tragic car accident, this event stays with Alice her entire life, but life must go on and she eventually meets Charles Blackwell a bit of rogue from a well to do family. Charles is a silver spoon trust type who lives for the moment, the party, seemingly looking no further ahead then the next good time. Alice is enraptured by Charles and his upper-crust family and is willing to over look his faults, for weekends at the country club and the families summer compound. But then Charles finds god, and politics, and with his family connections goes from Governor Of Wisconsin to President of the United States. Charles style goes well with about half the electorate, he comes off as one of the folks. Unpolished but direct and strong in his convictions. It can't last however as Charles bulls his way through an unpopular war and the first couple must now contend with growing public disfavor.
Wait! Does this remind you of something? Yes the book is loosely based on the life of Laura Bush. I actually knew this and was looking forward to something along the lines of "Primary Colors" which most will remember was supposed to have been loosely based on the Clintons. This book will be divisive for some based on their politics, but this is in no way influencing my review, I was just looking for a good story. The "American Wife" is a type of historical fiction, call it current historical fiction. Its difficult to pull off because the events are so recent. Sittenfield does not quite pull this off, in spite of her great abilities. The book actually as a strong start. Alice's early years through her romance with Charles I actually found quite engaging. It is when the couple gets to Washington that the story does not hold together for me, and the ending felt flat. It could be that the events portrayed are too recent, I'm not sure. Anyway, the first half I give four stars the second gets two stars for an average of three stars.
If you like historical fiction of modern personalities I highly recommend "Misfits Country" a fictional look into the soul of Marilyn Monroe toward the end of her career.
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