Word: wifely
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...takes full creative advantage of that intelligent vagueness, and her novel encourages readers to do the same. I wonder, for example, what the First Lady would make of Jane Mayer's extraordinary account of the Bush Administration's torture policy, The Dark Side, which I read simultaneously with American Wife. It is no small astonishment that Sittenfeld's portrait of the President and his circle made Mayer's horror story more plausible for me: suddenly you understand how George W. Bush could abdicate his authority and allow Dick Cheney and his alarming chief of staff, David Addington, to abandon...
...with guilt: her carelessness behind the wheel once caused the death of a good friend. The prince is charming, as advertised, but also carefree in a way that the librarian envies and mistrusts. He adores her, without question. She succumbs, with reservations. In Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant novel American Wife, their names are Alice Lindgren and Charles Blackwell, and they come from Wisconsin. But we also know them, on the evening news, as Laura Welch and George W. Bush from Texas...
...grand, the spotlight too bright. Our public life already is ridiculously flagrant, far too obvious and overwrought for good fiction. And so, all too often, political novels descend from satire into cheap farce. Such books can be entertaining and sometimes cathartic but usually not very nourishing. American Wife is something else entirely - the opposite of a political satire, in fact - with a languorous pace and a fierce literary integrity: Alice and Charlie are complete creations, unique in their humanity - Alice especially. She is the quirky and (usually) reliable narrator. This is the story of her inner life, a place that...
...novel, Prep, was distinguished by the dead-on observations of upper-class life by a working-class narrator - a narrator, one imagines, not unlike Sittenfeld herself, who was jolted from Cincinnati to the rarefied precincts of the Groton School in Massachusetts. There is a similar class consciousness in American Wife, especially in the luscious passages in which Alice describes her first encounters with the Blackwell family at its summer estate, Halcyon, on Lake Michigan. The Blackwells are overwhelming, especially the materfamilias, known as Maj (short for "Her Majesty"). They are classic inbred Wasps, fetishizers of the threadbare - there is only...
...group to make it happen." That group - Watch on Wasilla - included a handful of the town's most influential figures: St. George; the town's mayor, John Stein; and Palin, who wasn't in elected office yet. Her father-in-law Jim Palin and his wife Faye were also in the group...