As mentioned in my last book post, I love this time of the year with all the "best of" lists. The good new/bad news scenario is I find myself with a lot of books being added to the "to be read" list. Typically, I have not ready (m)any of the books on these lists since they are still in hardcover and, in the past, I generally waited until they were released in paperback (both my frugal-ish side coming out and a reading list so long that I am never lacking a book to read to justify a hardcover purchase/price). But, thanks to the Kindle, I am getting to some of these books earlier.
Such is the case with Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife. There was a lot of buzz when it came out and it has been one of the staples on these year-end book lists (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and in the Top 10 Fiction books for Time and Entertainment Weekly... and People). Normally this would have been a book to put on my "wait for paperback" list, but thanks to a $9.99 Kindle Price (retail: $26, Amazon sells the physical book for 40% off/$15.60), I didn't hesitate to get right on it. On a Kindle sidenote... yes, I still feel guilty for not supporting "brick and mortar" bookstores... but then again, this book won't be sitting in a landfill one day... though yes, this device with toxic ingredients and significantly less degradable will be... oh, the moral dilemmas!
Anyhow back to the book! American Wife is one big character study. Meet Alice Blackwell, a teacher turned librarian who ends ultimately ends up falling for a somewhat bumbling son of a rich, political family... where bumbling son ends up buying a baseball team, having a bout with the bottle, gets into politics himself... eventually becoming a state governor before ascending to the White House in the tightest election ever and he is ultimately bogged down by his decision to go to war after a terrorist attack on US grounds, that coincidentally enough took place on September 11th. Sound familiar? Well, I don't think you'd be too deserving of a prize if you figured out that our protagonist and title character here is a thinly veiled fictionalized version of Laura Bush.
But apparently the soon-to-be former First Lady is a tad too boring to really carry a book. As just mentioned above, there are a lot of similarities... and Alice is also haunted by her participation in a car accident that resulted in the death of a high school classmate... but Sittenfeld (who, btw, is female... my 2nd "male first name/but actually a female" author of the year - the first, Lionel Shriver) takes lots of additional and juicy/soap opera-y liberties to beef up this small town girl to First Lady saga.
But thus lies my dilemma with this book. I don't know how much credit to Sittenfeld for basically take a true story and just beefing it up and/or doing creative revisionism... i.e., wouldn't it be fun if Laura Bush was secretly a Democrat! See that's the thing, I think the reader is constantly asked to do "what if?" scenarios with Alice and thus she was never able to be her own unique character/not Laura Bush... even when the story goes "rogue"... i.e. Alice does not have twin daughters, you wonder why not? Though at times, you really do not want to make comparisons, particularly when the Blackwells got jiggy with it... let's just say Alice is being "serviced" by Charlie was one mental image I did not need to be imagined by their real-life counterparts!
Anyhow, the book is well-written, interesting, and entertaining... and feel that it can be recommended on these/many counts, but ultimately I felt that Sittenfeld is a talented enough writer/story-teller that she didn't need the hook, gimmick, crutch of the Bushes.
2008 1-2-3-4-5 Reading Challenge: + 556 Pages (Total: 11,086 pages - Finished: 12/6/2008)
-549 pages behind pace for the year (+116 change in pace since last book).
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