With the Bush presidency nearly over, and as it becomes clearer and clearer just how far-reaching the damage his disastrous reign has inflicted upon the environment, the economy, and the United States’ reputation abroad — not to mention how many decades it will take to undo it all — how curious it is that the two major fictionalizations of the Bush White House to have come out in the last couple of months have taken a sympathetic view of the overmatched ignoramus at the centre of it all.Oliver Stone’s film W. doesn’t exactly let Dubya off the hook for the ineffective, unmotivated war in Iraq, but by focusing on Bush’s struggles for his father’s approval and by putting Josh Brolin’s charismatic performance at the centre of every scene, Stone makes it impossible for you to regard Bush as a simplistic villain — or as a simplistic simpleton, for that matter.
In a way, Curtis Sittenfeld goes even farther towards rehabilitating Bush’s image in her new novel American Wife. He isn’t called Bush in the book — instead, he’s Charlie Blackwell, heir to a Wisconsin meatpacking fortune, part owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and the son of the state’s former governor — but Sittenfeld is hardly trying to fool anybody. He has drug and alcohol issues, he becomes a born-again Christian, he gains the presidency through a bitterly contested recount, he gets embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, he makes a prematurely triumphant victory speech on board on aircraft carrier, he’s widely perceived as an intellectual lightweight.
But Sittenfeld makes the rather inspired decision to make Charlie a secondary character in the novel, and instead make the book about the Laura Bush figure, here named Alice Lindgren, a prim, bookish, Democrat librarian who somehow winds up married to a loud, often boorish, proudly anti-intellectual man who represents what some might call the worst aspects of the Republican Party.
Laura has always been the most enigmatic member of the Bush administration, and Sittenfeld works hard to postulate possible answers to all those questions that have always surrounded her: What does she see in that man? What is going on behind that frozen smile? Does she really approve of his presidency? And if she doesn’t, how much blame should we lay at her feet for not using her influence to steer her husband in a different direction?
Sittenfeld is better at answering the personal questions than the political ones. Bush’s appeal may be invisible to most blue-staters, but in American Wife, it makes total sense that a woman — even a shy, teetotaling Democrat like Alice Lindgren — would fall for him. Sittenfeld brings out the best in her Bush character — he’s brash, coarse, and boastful, sure, with a confidence in himself that comes from growing up rich and never having had his notions challenged, but he’s also un-self-consciously handsome, with a healthy sense of humour about himself and a zest for the horseplay of being alive. For all his faults — his occasional selfishness and thoughtlessness — he’s a good husband who genuinely values Alice’s presence in his life and who is willing to dramatically reform himself when he’s on the verge of leaving her.
Alice herself is a more hazily drawn character — a passive woman who seems like the truly accidental inhabitant of the White House, not Charlie. (Like Laura, she kills a high school classmate in a car crash, a tragedy that sends huge reverberations through her life which, indirectly, almost cause her husband’s downfall.) She’s a bit too much of a question mark on which to hang a 550-page book, and yet something about the voice Sittenfeld invents for her — wry, precise, self-questioning but only up to a point — is compelling enough to pull you through the story.
At least, that is, until the final section, which takes place after Charlie becomes president and whose thematic preoccupations (life as an absurdly famous person, the extent to which one can be held responsible for the actions of one’s spouse) feel like they belong to a different book. This section of the book is about public life, but it’s Sittenfeld’s insights into “George” and “Laura”’s private lives that are the book’s highlights.
This is the kind of material I wish W. had more of — the off-the-record moments with Dubya, scenes that are obviously invented but whose fictional “truth” tells you something about these figures that actual truth cannot. In that sense, the most shocking confession that Sittenfeld’s Alice makes in the book is not that she once had an abortion (which Laura Bush did not), but that she voted for the other guy. I don’t know how the real Laura cast her ballot, but I wouldn’t be surprised...
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