So here’s the novella: it’s called All Along, This was What was Supposed to Happen. Here’s an extract that ought to intrigue you enough to least give it a whirl:
“Which is how she found herself sitting alone in her apartment at 10:15 at night looking at penises. Actual penises! And these were under the "m4w" heading, not even the more complicated headings that she had to pause to decipher, like "t4mw." No, in the "men for women" section, you could click on a headline as innocuous-sounding as "Looking for Fun" and find yourself gazing at a disembodied, erect male member. Were there women out there who'd be tempted by this explicit greeting? Presumably so. The world we live in, Patrice thought wonderingly, half-appalled at the seediness and half-impressed at the gumption of the individuals who'd so brazenly go after what they wanted. Patrice's own forays into online dating, which had been of the decidedly more PG-rated variety, had mostly served to remind her of the pleasures of her own company: In the last eight years, she'd been told by three separate men—two were white, and one was black—that she reminded them of Condoleezza Rice, an observation to which she'd been tempted to respond, at least to the white men, by saying they reminded her of George W. Bush.”
Interesting, pithy, and with the lightest touch of sentimentality – which no one can deny Obama’s election calls for.
That I liked Curtis Sittenfield’s novella can’t be a surprise to many of you. But no one can be more surprised than I am about how much I liked Sittenfield’s American Wife. Who’d ‘ave thunk that a “work of fiction loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady” – Laura Bush – would appeal to me? But as much as I loathed everything the Bush era epitomized, I was carried away by the 550 page saga of Alice Blackwell’s quiet reflections on life. I suppose the test of literature is that it gets one to show sympathy – perhaps even empathy – for someone incredibly different to oneself; in that respect, American Wife does all that can be asked of it.
The book can – and probably should be – read as a response to this kind of perception of Laura Bush.
Alice’s all encompassing conceit is that it is possible to be in love with and to remain married to a man to whom she is superior in knowledge, temperament, discipline, and understanding... and I find it fascinating that this is signaled by her reading constantly because we will all recognize that anyone who reads as voraciously, as intellectually, as she does cannot possibly be an idiot Republican right-wing nutter. Alice disagrees with much of Charlie's (Dubya's) world-view but other than occasionally broaching these issues with him, never signals such disagreement and then wonders why she is being held accountable for his actions and thoughts. The answer – because she offers up none of her own and in deed, if not in thought, mirrors his – brings up the essential question of being: is it possible to think certain things, to feel a certain way, and while not expressing these thoughts or feelings in any way, still be? In other words, is silent disagreement, expressionless independent thought, resistance on the inside, ever possible?
I am a creature of the world; to me, the answer is no – there is no mere being, there is only being in the world. One is – or should be – accountable for the perception one creates or does not object to being created for one. In the end, for Alice Blackwell, wife of the Republican President of the
American Wife isn’t all delusion and politics, though. It is funny and poignant about the mundane as it lays bare the anatomy of a marriage; it reminds us once again that only those inside a relationship – any relationship, not just a marriage to a POTUS – really know what its interior fabric is made of – from the outside, we can speculate but cannot know its warp and weft.
