Joyce Carol Totes
Granted, I have a massive girl-crush on Curtis Sittenfeld, a crush so powerful it withstood the experience of reading The Man of My Dreams in hardback as soon as it came out (in terms of letdowns, roughly the same as being the first person in line at the midnight showing of Harold and Kumar II). And granted also, I think Joyce Carol Oates is kind of a hack, what with her sixty different literary novels about serial killers in love with their sisters. Her latest, btw, is about JonBenet Ramsey, making her both suspiciously prolific and about ten years too late.
What I’m saying is that I might be biased, but I still think Oates’s review of Sittenfeld’s amazing-sounding new novelization of the life of Laura Bush, American Wife, is kind of bogus. Look, for example, at this put-down of Prep:
Much acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2005, the tersely titled “Prep” is not a brilliantly corrosive adolescent cri de coeur like J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” still less a powerful indictment of conformist American racist society like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but an unassuming coming-of-age memoirist fiction tracing the adventures and misadventures of a Midwestern girl…If Lee Fiora is a 21st-century American-girl pilgrim of sorts, her quest isn’t for a searing and illuminating truth but a girl’s wish to be “popular” with her peers and to be noticed.
One of the crazy things about fiction is that there’s often a difference between the intentions of the protagonist and the intentions of the novel itself. Yes, Lee really just wants to kiss Cross Sugarman (for the record, so do I) but that doesn’t make the book somehow untrue, or uninterested in the truth. In fact, what makes Prep so good is its relentless devotion to accuracy, to making Lee utterly unlikeable in a very realistic way.
Or take this awesomely condescending little paragraph:
Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous — as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet “American Wife” might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the “American wife” is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections — the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide “love” excuses all.
Yeah, I’m sure that while thinking about Laura Bush for like two years, it never crossed Sittenfeld’s mind that her relationship with W might be an allegory for the country’s.
Obviously, I really, really want to like American Wife. And Oates ultimately seems pretty positive about it, despite all her Prep-bashing. Actually, the only thing in the review that makes the book seem disappointing are the excerpts: “Was I mutable, without a fixed identity?” the Laura Bush character muses. (I’m going to guess the answer is “yes.”) Still, Laura Bush’s life story is pretty fascinating, and there’s no one else I’d trust to do it justice; even Tony Kushner’s play about her, from around 2003, was totally unsastisfying in its look at Laura-Bush-as-person, as opposed to Laura-Bush-as-wife-of-monster. Maybe Curtis could do Sarah Palin next!
