"i only married him"

I don't write about lit enough ... actually, seeing as this is my second post this month, I'd say I don't write enough period. Things are busy, what can I say. And my computer has been down. I came home one night and it sounded like Mothra was battling Godzilla in there. Needless to say, getting and keeping an appointment at a Genius Bar in New York is not an easy thing. Hopefully I will have some clarity after tomorrow.

I have, though, been reading with satisfying regularity. I think it's the daily Park Slope to Manhattan subway routine, which allows me to plow through novels and actually stay current with the New Yorker. I recently finished Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, her thinly veiled biography of soon-to-be-former First Lady Laura Bush.

I'm generally not a fan of Sittenfeld. The buzz around Prep still mystifies me; I thought the book was glorified chick lit. Yeah, it's readable, but there's no substance. American Wife has a similar, Lifetime-ready feel (she has sex with her dead boyfriend's brother, she has an abortion, the future president goes down on her). Here, at least, we get a mildly amusing heroine. It's fun to see Sittenfeld attempt to understand and rationalize Laura Bush, a woman who still appeals to the American people, even those who find her husband utterly toxic. Sittenfeld paints Bush (oh, excuse me, Alice Blackwell, as she's known here) as a bookish, sensible librarian who is never the same after she accidentally kills her high school beau in a car accident. She ends up with George W. (oh, excuse me, Charles), a boorish, dimwitted politico's son who downs booze, does lines, and runs companies into the ground before an inexplicable rise to the presidency.

Sittenfeld aptly handles Alice's inner turmoil, and the first two thirds of the book, which cover her childhood and the rocky early does of her marriage to Charles, are fairly intriguing. But she loses us when the Blackwells make it to the White House. It's a jarring temporal shift - we go from Charlie hitting his political stride on the state level straight to being a lame duck in the White House. We're spared the gory details of the campaign, and that's a shame. Sittenfeld is noticeably uncomfortable talking politics, what we get is the AOL home page version of the 2000 election and the war in Iraq. It's ham-fisted, sloppy, and anti-climactic (though I did like the moment when the Karl Rove stand-in manipulates Alice into getting a face lift and follow-up botox procedures. That was a hoot).