Curtis Sittenfeld – American Wife
November 24, 2008
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon: this novel, loosely inspired by the life of Laura Bush, fails to shed much light on its subject
Curtis Sittenfeld seeks to fill in the blanks in American Wife, her third novel. “Loosely inspired” by the life of Laura Bush, it chronicles the rise of Alice Lindgren from a small Midwest town to the world’s most visible residence. Despite a healthy dose of apple pie, there is plenty of tumult in Alice’s youth, including a peek at closeted homosexuality, an unwanted pregnancy and a terrible car accident in which Alice causes the death of the boy of her dreams (the last incident is taken almost directly from Laura’s own life).
Everything changes when Alice meets the charming if crude Charlie Blackwell, the son of a former Wisconsin governor. Sittenfeld’s book is at its best in describing the turbulent early years of Alice’s marriage, as an increasingly hard-drinking Charlie lurches from failure to failure in an effort to find his place in a famous family. The novel concludes in the White House in the waning days of Charlie’s administration, when Alice is forced to confront both her own hidden past and her husband’s unapologetic responsibility for a disastrous war.
Although occasionally entertaining, Sittenfeld’s excessively long novel fails to shed much light on its mysterious subject. Alice possesses all the attributes of a beguiling heroine (hidden secrets, romantic entanglements, moral quandaries), but the author proves unable to breathe much life into her. This is due primarily to a bland, overly detailed prose style that drains the excitement from even the most dramatic scenes, such as that fatal car wreck.
Sittenfeld’s decision to relocate the action from Texas to Wisconsin is a strategic error, replacing all that outsize Lone Star passion with sleepy Midwestern rectitude. The book’s biggest disappointment, however, is Charlie, whose belching, braying antics keep him from becoming anything more than a suburban buffoon. Any woman can marry one of those – what we really want to read about is the wife who sleeps nightly beside a man who can send thousands to their deaths without a moment’s self-doubt.
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Doubleday £11.99 pp576
Jim Harrison- The English Major
November 24, 2008
Globe and Mail, Canada
Alone again, unnaturally
STEPHEN AMIDON
THE ENGLISH MAJOR
By Jim Harrison
Anansi, 255 pages, $29.95
It is sometimes tempting to think that all those traffic jams on U.S. highways are caused by the large number of fictional characters out there in search of themselves. The Joads in their rickety pickup lumbering along in the slow lane; Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in that 1950 Cadillac, hogging the fast lane; Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic father and son blocking the shoulder with their shopping cart – it’s a wonder you can get anywhere with all those protagonists hogging the road.
Cliff, the hero of Jim Harrison’s new novel, adds to this heavy traffic. Having recently been abandoned by his wife of 38 years, the schoolteacher-turned-farmer decides to sell his Michigan farm and hit the road. His wife, Vivian, it turns out, left him for a high school sweetheart she hooked up with at their 40th reunion. “Now I’m free, white, and sixty,” Cliff complains, “but I don’t want to be free.”
The journey he undertakes is quixotic, to say the least. Piloting a brown Taurus with nearly 250,000 miles on it, Cliff intends to wander the country using a childhood puzzle as his map. “I decided to take the jigsaw puzzle of the United States and throw a piece out when I crossed the border into a new state.” On the way, he plans to rename each state, as well as conjure new names for the country’s several thousand species of birds.
His trek soon goes awry when he collects a former student named Marybelle, who is unhappily married to an archeologist in Minnesota. They begin a torrid romance that tests the limits of Cliff’s aging body as well as his patience. In addition to being addicted to her cellphone, the 43-year-old Marybelle also shows delusional tendencies, especially when it becomes clear that the son she claims is living in Africa does not exist. Before too long, Cliff even grows tired of their unbridled lovemaking. “Forty-five years of sex fantasies come true and I’m thinking that I wish I could go fishing.”
He winds up depositing Marybelle with his gay son in San Francisco so she can pursue a life in the theatre. He presses on to Arizona, where he hooks up with his old friend Bert, owner and operator of a snake farm. After things there go predictably wrong, Cliff beats a hasty retreat to Montana, where he holes up in a cabin on the Yellowstone River to complete his renaming project.
While there, Cliff comes to understand what the reader has suspected since the rubber first hit the road: “It came to me that I wasn’t in first-rate mental shape when I had left Michigan, and perhaps for some time afterwards.” A disastrous visit from an old doctor friend sends him high-tailing it back to Michigan, where he is forced to confront a marriage that might not be quite as dead as he thought.
Although that hectic plot summary might set the hearts of Harrison’s fans beating faster, The English Major turns out to be a surprisingly low-key affair. Although Harrison’s familiar themes of wounded machismo, Western wanderlust and native American tragedy are present, they are dealt with in a perfunctory manner. Even set pieces as richly promising as that visit to the snake farm, or the arrival of a voluptuous nude model at Cliff’s isolated cabin, peter out without really catching fire. There is something oddly fitting about the fact that his journey turns out to be both truncated and circular.
The English Major proves far more effective as a study of the limits of solitude. Cliff is a fine character whose irascible, raunchy, self-lacerating voice grabs you right from the start. His big journey through life started with collegiate idealism: “We English majors of a serious bent are susceptible to high ideals we paste on our lives like decals.” But after an unhappy spell as a junior high school teacher, he retreated to the land, which allowed him spend year after year alone with his thoughts, only to discover that there was precious little solace or clarity in them.
His failed journey teaches him the folly of his cheap imitation of Thoreau. “I began to wonder what we are when we are alone. Maybe we don’t count for much unless we are rubbing against others.” The novel ends with Cliff joining a group of geriatric birdwatchers, only to get into a squabble with them that results in him almost getting brained with a cane. Cliff may be returning to the realm of human contact – though it seems clear that in his case this will usually mean rubbing people the wrong way.
Sunday Times John Updike – Widows of Eastwick
November 18, 2008
The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
On the face of it, a sequel to John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick is a promising idea. Given that his 1984 fantasia provided a lively gloss on the bacchanalian forces let loose by the 1960s, it stands to reason that revisiting his three suburban witches could provide readers with a snapshot of where America has gone in the decades since Alexandra, Jane and Sukie turned their quiet Rhode Island town upside down.
As its title suggests, The Widows of Eastwick, set in the early years of the new millennium, finds its heroines newly released from matrimonial bonds by the deaths of their second husbands. Alexandra, at 74 the eldest of the group, is living in New Mexico, having recently planted her estimable if somewhat dull potter husband in the desert earth. Jane, the threesome’s firebrand, is living in a large house in Boston with her 104-year-old mother-in-law after the loss of her spouse, a stuffy antiquarian dealer. And Sukie, the youngest of the group, has just escaped “the tidy Connecticut satellite city where she had been a second wife and where 30 years had gone by like a game of Pretend”.
The novel opens with Alexandra indulging in the time-honoured privilege of many American widows – the package tour. Her first excursion is a trip to Canada, where, after discovering that “totem poles and moose had a basic boringness”, she feels herself “trapped in an attic full of stuffed animals”. After reestablishing contact, she and Jane take an Egyptian holiday, where they indulge in a little of the old black magic during a midnight cruise on the Nile. Sukie then joins them for a trip to China, where they playfully cause Mao’s corpse to wink as they file through his mausoleum.
Jane and Sukie then propose to summer in Eastwick, “the scene of our primes”, to recapture some of that old black magic. Alexandra is dubious, though she eventually justifies a return by seeing it as an attempt to perform expiation for their slaying of young Jenny Gabriel, the favourite of their former coven master Darryl Van Horne. “Healing,” she explains to her sisters when pressed about why she has agreed to come, “and undoing whatever wrong we did here.”
After renting Van Horne’s old mansion (alas, the old devil is nowhere in sight in this book), they start to reintegrate into their old community, only to find it considerably less amenable to sorcery than when they fled. Sukie has a chance encounter with an old lover, now turned decrepit and undesirable; Alexandra bumps into the widow of one of her old flames, who asks her to conjure a spell to help her daughter conceive. The novel springs to life with the arrival of Christopher Gabriel, Jenny’s effete younger brother and Van Horne’s one-time protégé. Using powers learnt from his old master, he begins to exact revenge on his sister’s tormentors. Although the ensuing duel is not without casualties, the novel concludes on a positive note, with another junket in the offing.
The Widows of Eastwick is a singularly unsuccessful effort. In fact, it is difficult to see the point of the novel at all. Given the feebleness of the magic that they are able to conjure up, Updike’s three heroines might as well have been estate agents. While the book’s predecessor bristled with wicked action, here almost nothing happens. There is a perfunctory, clichéd feel to those early holidays – at one point Alexandra even remarks that the Great Wall “is the only work of Man that could be seen by observers on the moon”.
Enervating nostalgia permeates the novel’s Eastwick chapters – it is as if everyone wishes they were back in the prequel, where all the fun is. Storylines are established only to be allowed to peter out without resolution: at one point, Sukie develops a crush on a female Unitarian pastor, raising the prospect of a lesbian affair between a witch and an ordained minister. But Updike loses interest in the whole matter soon after it is mooted. Even less inspired is his depiction of the showdown between Christopher and the witches, a battle whose climax is surprising only because it is so implausible.
Near the book’s end, Alexandra’s frumpy daughter Marcy, who never left Eastwick, criticises her mother for trying to relive the past. “You’re disappointed,” she tells Alexandra. “The magic you thought would happen hasn’t.” She could just as easily have been speaking to the reader.
The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp320
