How Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife” Imbues Even Its Ugliest Characters with Nuance

In 2011, I travelled with a friend to Fez, a beautiful old walled city in Morocco. On my second day, and through no fault of my own or of others, I came down with food poisoning and had to spend one of those gruesome, almost hallucinatory nights in the bathroom.

It could have been trip-ruining, but I crawled into bed at dawn feeling calm and even (perversely) nourished. That was because I had read, all in one go, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.

Since I loved Sittenfeld’s first and second books, Prep (2005) and The Man of My Dreams (2006), it’s strange to me now that I took three years to read American Wife. I think it was because, as a left-wing person, and not myself an American, I was put off that it was based on a Republican First Lady: Laura Bush.

What an error! The book was a revelation. It helped me to see that a whole world opens up when a writer like Sittenfeld explores a character about whom our assumptions are so reductive.

American Wife begins by placing us in the first-person perspective of the Laura stand-in, Alice Blackwell. “Have I made terrible mistakes?” she wonders, lying awake, the George W stand-in Charlie snoring beside her. “Did I jeopardize my husband’s presidency today? Did I do something I should have done years ago? Or perhaps I did both, and that’s the problem—that I lead a life in opposition to itself.”

The readers’ appetite whetted (what did Alice do?), we go back in time to her childhood. Unlike the spiky, observant outsider protagonists of Sittenfeld’s earlier books, Alice is calm, kind, secure: “mindful of what I perceived as my advantages.” “What I remember,” Alice’s mother touchingly says, “is that you were always such a dear little girl.”

But of course, like all children, Alice has a secret inner life. Her flamboyant Granny, “sustained on a diet of nicotine and literature,” is revealed as a closeted lesbian. Equally dramatically, Alice is in love with a long-eyelashed classmate, Andrew Imhof. Tragically, just as they seemed destined to get together, seventeen year-old Alice causes Andrew’s death in a car accident—based on a real crash caused by a young Laura Bush. For a while, it derails Alice entirely.

That’s the first of four parts. In the second, we find Alice living a calm and orderly life as a school librarian in her early thirties. Single, she’s immersed in a quixotic art project: making papier mâché sculptures of characters from children’s books, including The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, to display in the school where she works.

At a cookout she didn’t wish to attend, she meets Charlie. A nuanced portrait of him evolves as we look through Alice’s eyes: he’s bombastic, childish, indolent, drunk, and a casual dropper of the f-slur and the r-slur (bad). He’s also charismatic, funny, open, handsome, and very sexually generous (good?).

He’s moved and delighted by Alice’s sculptures for the children. He reads The Giving Tree in full, standing in a bookstore: it would have been better if he paid for it, but that’s still extremely lovable.

They become a couple, and when Alice sees a single woman, while grocery shopping, she thinks, “I wanted to clasp her freckled hand, to say to her…It’s good on the other side, but it’s good on your side, too. Enjoy it there. The loneliness is harder, and the loneliness is the biggest part; but some things are easier.”

She is on a knife-edge with Charlie, and the reader deeply feels her torment. Pro: she loves him (he makes her feel like “a pat of butter melting in a hot pan.”) Con: everything else, including his gruesome family.

She allows their life together to progress, and eventually Alice and Charlie are happily(ish)-married parents of a daughter, Ella. Things do not always remain “easier” with Charlie. Now in his forties, he is in midlife crisis territory, drinking too much and moaning about his “legacy”.

Just as he achieves a boost in his career, he runs off the rails entirely. Alice leaves him for a time and returns to her childhood home, and Charlie quits drinking and finds God. By the end of the section, he is a Governor of Wisconsin.

(It’s a measure of the incredible experience of reading this book that these broad summaries will in no way reduce its pleasure; besides, the ultimate spoiler, that Charlie/George W becomes President, is foregrounded from the start.) Somehow, through all that, her love for him remains.

Part four brings us to Alice in the novel’s present day and this, to me, is the part that has influenced me the most. In reviews I’ve read of American Wife, the fourth part is sometimes characterized as “weaker.” (In more polite reviews, the first three-quarters is referred to as particularly strong.)

But I think quite the opposite: the first three quarters are strong and the last is even better. As Sittenfeld folds events from the past back in into the narrative, Alice must confront the truth and work out what she really believes. Is her husband “bad?” Is she, for loving him? She’s not a Republican—she didn’t even vote for him! “All I did is marry him,” she rages, or as close to rage as Alice Blackwell gets. “You are the ones who gave him power.”

The final verdict, on everything, is left up to the reader. One thing is clear though: Charlie and Alice are fully human. (Too human, for some appalled readers, forced to think of the Bushes having sex). In this way, the whole book is an extraordinary and compelling act of imagination.

I reread American Wife several times when I was working on Consider Yourself Kissed. My novel, too, is about a woman who loves reading and marries a man who loves success. I was trying to work out how you could show two flawed, imperfect people who are still worthy of compassion and love.

One of my minor characters is the British version of a Republican, a Tory Member of Parliament. He’s half charming, half ghastly. But isn’t that what most people are like—however they happen to vote? Not all good, not all bad: a mix. The person who sits in judgment must be the reader, not the writer. It’s the writer’s job to show their characters in full.

In American Wife, chain-smoking, closeted Granny made Alice a reader, and being a reader made her the most herself: reading “had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.”

There’s still a part of me that wants to rail: what use is curiosity and sympathy in times of straight-up fascism? And certainly, the current occupant of the White House doesn’t deserve a nuanced treatment.

But what about our friends, our colleagues and neighbors, our fellow citizens, even ourselves? The other part of me, the part of me that revisits this excellent novel for comfort, recognizes the value in keeping these sympathy and curiosity muscles strong. And how important, almost miraculous, it is to be made to feel and care.

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Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley is available via Riverhead.