Review #36: American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Lots of people (do I have to tm Donald Trump?) around here have been reading Curtis Sittenfeld lately. I've seen the Pride & Prejudice remake reviews, but that wasn't available on my library's website, so I downloaded American Wife instead. In my head - and most likely because of the cover - I thought it would be about a Jackie Kennedy-esque first lady, but instead, it became increasingly clear that it's a thinly veiled tale of First Lady Laura Bush.

American Wife is the story of quiet, unassuming Alice Lindgreen, an only child from a small Wisconsin town, who meets and marries a boyishly charming and wealthy man who eventually becomes governor and then president. The first half of the book deals with Alice's childhood and upbringing, detailing her high school years, a tragic car accident on the eve of her senior year in which the object of her affection is killed, and her subsequent involvement with the dead boy's older brother, which results in an unplanned pregnancy that reveals some surprising news about her eccentric grandmother. Sittenfeld then moves on to Alice's life as a young, unmarried librarian, describing her time spent at the local elementary school and her friends' concerns that Alice hasn't married yet. Eventually, Alice meets Charlie Blackwell, the son of the former governor, and the only brother in the family to not be involved in politics. Charlie comes from a privileged background, he's charming and impish and, despite the differences in their beliefs, Alice can't resist him, and so they marry and have a daughter. For a little while, Alice and Charlie seem happy, but it quickly becomes obvious that Charlie has a drinking problem, and an employment problem, and a being a decent husband problem. The family doesn't really know what to do with him, but he is installed as a part owner of the local baseball team just about the time he also becomes a born-again Christian, and that seems to settle him down and it feels as though Charlie finally begins to grow up.

The second half of the book jumps from Charlie's time with the baseball team to his presidency; his time as governor warrants just one paragraph. It's post 9/11, and Charlie is running an increasingly unpopular war in the Middle East, his poll numbers are tanking, the father of a dead soldier has camped out across from the White House demanding an audience, and there's a woman who is threatening to reveal that Alice had an abortion in her teens. This could be disastrous for Charlie - he ran as solidly pro-life - but Alice is at the point where she kind of doesn't care any longer. Much of the second part of the book deals with Alice's weariness at the inconveniences Charlie's presidency has caused: the lack of privacy, people speaking out against her husband, the fact that she is suddenly one of the most famous women in the world. But what she focuses most on is her inability to speak her mind. Alice has very different opinions from Charlie - on the war, on abortion rights, on religion, on education, on just about everything - but as First Lady, she must remain loyal to her husband, even when she feels he is wrong.

Reviews I've read on American Wife are mixed. Sittenfeld is a fine writer - she certainly knows how to weave a good tale - but I struggled with the characters. Alice was on the edge of dull, occasionally showing bits of strength, but I found myself frustrated with her, although to be fair, I think she was frustrated with herself. Alice wanted to be more, she had the potential to be more and she knew it, but she held back, and I'm not sure whether I found it admirable that she did what she thought she had to in support of her husband, or irritating that she wasn't more outspoken and brave. Charlie was self-centered and annoying, a bro before the term was coined, and wildly immature. Traits that I think Sittenfeld meant to come across as charming - the boyishness, the dreamy qualities, the little boy still in love with baseball - instead made Charlie seem woefully stunted and too childlike to be taken seriously. The best character in the novel was Alice's grandmother, a strong, independent, slightly eccentric and very mysterious woman who introduced Alice to the love of reading (as an aside, Sittenfeld redeemed herself with her treatises on various novels; it's very obvious that she's a book lover of the highest order, and so I loved her a little bit for that) and took her out to show her the world.

American Wife just felt uneven, as though Sittenfeld - like Alice - couldn't quite decide what she wanted it to be. Perhaps this just isn't her best effort. But I trust my Cannonballers, so Eligible is still on my TBR list. 

Review #35: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, by Susannah Cahalan

I've seen Brain on Fire a few times at the bookstore, and it was the subtitle that kept catching my eye - "My Month of Madness" - and so when I found it on sale, I picked it up. I thought I would be getting a book about a Nellie Bly-style reporter who feigns mental illness to write an expose on our country's health care system. Instead, I got a terrifying account of what happens when a young woman can't get the right diagnosis, and how quickly a disease can spread.

Susannah Cahalan is in her early 20s, an up and coming New York Post reporter, when she first experiences bizarre symptoms that she can't explain. At first blush, it sounds as though she's showing signs of the beginnings of schizophrenia, or perhaps even some sort of bizarre opiod reaction. She scratches at her arms, experiences paranoia, is feverish, hallucinates that her apartment is infested with bed bugs, and finally, begins having seizures. The doctor can't find anything wrong, and sends her on her way, actually sending her to her OB-GYN thinking that maybe she's having a reaction to her birth control. (Which is a move that made zero sense to me, but that's why I'm not a doctor.) The gynecologist can't find anything wrong with her, but recommends that she stop taking her pill, and when the seizures don't go away and her paranoia becomes more extreme, her parents and boyfriend finally step in, and raise holy hell to get her the help she needs.

After hundreds of tests and hundreds of thousands of dollars, during which time Cahalan is often strapped to her bed because of her violent outbursts, she is becoming increasingly catatonic, her fever won't abate, and the doctors are on the verge of giving up, ready to commit her to a mental institution. But then, in a very lucky coincidence, she meets Dr. Souhel Najjar, who is, she says, "the man you go to when nothing made sense". Dr. Najjar gives her a piece of paper and a pencil, and asks her to draw a clock. Cahalan does, but all of the numbers are on one side of the clock, and a lightbulb goes off in Dr. Najjar's head: whatever is happening to Cahalan is happening to her brain. He suspects that she has autoimmune encephalitis, and a second physician, Dr. Joseph Dalmua, confirms the diagnosis. Cahalan's brain is, literally, on fire. 

Autoimmune encephalitis is, essentially, a medical condition in which the body's own immune system attacks the brain. It can affect all ages, races, and genders, but it is most common in young women. In fact, according to the Autoimmune Encephalitis Association, 75% of all autoimmune disease patients are women. Research in to the disease is quite new, and they are still not altogether sure how one contracts it. Sometimes  it begins in tumors generally located in the ovaries, but more often, it appears as though it's a result of exposure to a common bacteria. Cahalan posits in the later part of the book - and this was a running thread when I did further research - that many people who were consigned to insane asylums in the past were actually suffering from the condition, but its symptoms so closely mimic schizoid behavior that physicians misdiagnosed quite a number of patients.

Cahalan's story is impeccably researched. She has no memory of these events, only of waking up in the hospital, so even though she writes in first person, everything had to be reconstructed through hundreds of hours of interviews with her doctors, nurses, coworkers, friends, and parents. She had access to the notebook her parents used to communicate; divorced, they often took turns sitting with her in the hospital and although one gets the sense that their post-divorce relationship wasn't exactly warm and fuzzy, they absolutely presented a united front and fought like hell for their daughter. Some of her time in the hospital was videotaped, and I can't imagine the strength it must have required to watch those videos.

Throughout the book, Cahalan makes a couple of references to the cost of her treatment. In more than one instance, she says that the cost of that month of madness was over a million dollars, and my guess is that's a conservative estimate. There's no mention of what continued maintenance and treatment costs are. Thankfully, Cahalan had health insurance through her employer, but it did make me wonder about the state of health insurance and medical care in this country. Would she have received the same treatment or had access to the same physicians if she were in a public hospital? If she were on a state or federal health insurance plan? What if her deductible was 20%? That's $200,000, for a journalist who is still paying back student loans and probably bringing home less than a quarter of that annually. Brain on Fire isn't the book to dissect the pros and cons of our health care system and Cahalan never makes a statement either way, but it is definitely food for thought.

I wasn't able to find much on what Cahalan is doing now, but a quick, very non-stalkerish Google search tells me that she married Stephen, the absolutely incredibly boyfriend who stood by her during this incredibly difficult time. It appears as though she's still in contact with her doctors and does some speaking about her condition and other rare diseases. I hope she's doing well and is happy and healthy. 

Review #34: Body Movers, by Stephanie Bond

I downloaded Body Movers as an audio book to keep me company on my commute because sometimes I think that all I do is drive, and there's only so much NPR I can listen to during election season without wanting to tear my hair out. Body Movers seemed like it would be a darkly funny little diversion but it was... not. It was actually almost sort of painfully dull.

Carlotta Wren works in the couture department of Neiman Marcus in the Atlanta mall. Her younger brother, Wesley, is nineteen and in trouble for hacking in to the Atlanta police department's database. The police department thinks Wesley was fixing a traffic ticket; in reality he was looking for information about his parents, because Mom and Dad disappeared in the middle of a trial (for... extortion? embezzlement? something like that...) when Carlotta was just nineteen, leaving her behind to raise Wesley. Wesley becomes involved with Coop, the local body mover (I guess the coroner doesn't do that any more?) and Carlotta goes with him on a call to remove the body of Angela Ashford, who just so happens to have tried to strangle Carlotta earlier in the day after accusing her of having an affair with Angela's husband Peter, who was engaged to Carlotta a million years ago but broke it off after her parents ran away. So now Peter (the husband) is suspected of the murder, Coop has the hots for Carlotta but it's weird cause he works with her brother (who, by the way, has a gambling problem), and it's also weird because in his spare time he builds miniatures in cigar boxes (like...dioramas, I guess?), Peter wants Carlotta back after all these years, even though he's on the hook for Angela's death, and oh, by the way, the cop who is investigating the murder has the hots for Carlotta, too. And it turns out that Angela was a high dollar hooker and that's why she was killed.

So there's a lot going on.

I think that Body Movers (and the subsequent series) was supposed to be kind of a like a coroner's version of Stephanie Plum, but it just wasn't funny. Janet Evanovich, for all that she's been kind of phoning it in lately, can still write mad-cap adventures and wacky highjinks. Body Movers was just too dull and too serious, and Carlotta had about as much personality as a wet dishrag. I couldn't understand why she had three men chasing after her. Peter Ashford made sense, because he was pretty dishrag-esque, too, but Coop and the detective had potential for so much more. I wanted to reach in to the book and pull them out and give them better material.

There are (at least) seven of these in the series; I have no desire to read any of the others. I'd rather listen to the news again.

Review #33: Heaven, Texas

This. Freaking. Book.

So I discovered Susan Elizabeth Phillips quite by accident, and Glitter Baby is now the go to reference between Boss and me whenever he feels the need to make fun of what I'm reading, and even though I point out again and again that my trashy romance novels are high literature compared to some of his trashy celebrity biographies, he still continues to make fun of me and I let him because he pays me. And sometimes he buys me diet Coke. So I figured - even though I've read other Phillips books that haven't been as fantastic but were still sort of decent - that Heaven, Texas would be a pleasurable diversion.

Except all it did was piss me off.

Bobby Tom (yes, that's his name, and I'm mortified to admit that I read a book where the romantic lead's first name is Bobby Tom; can you imagine yelling that out in a fit of passion?) is OMGthegreatestfootballplayer ever, but he's been forced to retire earlier than planned because of a career-ending injury. He's decided to try his hand at acting, although I'm not really sure why, since it's pretty clear that Bobby Tom is a gazillionaire and doesn't really want to act. Gracie Snow is a plucky thirty-year-old virgin with a rocking body, a bad haircut, worse clothes, and fancy lingerie who is assigned to get Bobby Tom from Chicago to the middle of nowhere, Texas. Bobby Tom mistakes her for a stripper, humiliates her in front of his friends and various vacuous women at a party, then proceeds to undress her against her will (but it's okay because it was in the privacy of his office), she outsmarts him the next morning, and together they set off for Texas in his vintage Thunderbird.

I'm not going to tell you the rest of the plot, because it doesn't matter, but I will tell you that the following things happen:
1. Bobby Tom lies to Gracie. A lot. Big lies. This doesn't appear to matter.
2. Bobby Tom is an asshole. A lot. This also doesn't appear to matter.

3. Bobby Tom decides without consulting Gracie that he's going to pretend that they are engaged so that the hussies of his hometown will leave him alone and then in almost the same breath freely admits that Gracie is beneath him appearance-wise, but figures he can gussy her up and make her sexy enough to pass muster, at least for the little while that they have to pretend to be together.

4. After sending Gracie on a humiliating makeover trip with his mother, where she buys clothes that she knows Bobby Tom will like but that make her feel uncomfortable and self-conscious, Bobby Tom chooses to completely ignore how great she looks, which sends Gracie in to a bigger spiral of low self-esteem and confusion and makes her feel, basically, like crap. And he does this on purpose. And we know this because we're treated to his stream-of-consciousness thought process about it.
5. When Bobby Tom and Gracie finally kiss for the first time, he sticks his hand down her pants and she has an orgasm immediately. Let me repeat that. A thirty year old virgin has an orgasm the first time a man touches her.
6. Bobby Tom can't understand why Gracie hasn't had sex before since she's "so responsive" and her body is made for sex.
7. Bobby Tom decides that he's going to do Gracie the favor of relieving her of her virginity because he can take better care of her than the idiots around town.
8. When they finally do have sex for the first time, again, Gracie has an orgasm immediately. Like, the second he touches her. With no warm up. Does this really happen? Has Cosmo been lying to me all these years? Am I doing something wrong?
9. Towards the end of the book, Bobby Tom proposes to Gracie in front of a crowd "for real", and when she says no, he hurls horrible insults at her over the PA system in front of the entire town, including saying things like he's too good for her and she'll never amount to anything.
10. Bobby Tom tells everyone he meets that his mom is a hooker. His mom is actually on the board of education and is widely regarded as the classiest woman in town. His mother thinks this story is cute and sighs with loving exasperation whenever it comes up.
11. This might be the biggest thing of all, and the one that made me decide to finish the book just so I could come here and rant about it. In a pretty rapey B story, Bobby Tom's widowed mom becomes involved with the man who owns the town's biggest employer because she's under the impression that if she doesn't sleep with him, he'll close up shop, effectively sentencing the town to a slow economic death. What's worse, the man knows it, but allows her to labor under that pretense because he's been in love with her for thirty years and wants to do the horizontal mambo with her, and he just can't help himself, so he promises he'll tell her in the morning. Except he never really does. But it's okay, because she wants him, too; she just feels guilty for "cheating" on her dead husband. So he effectively cons her in to having sex with him, knowing that she a) doesn't want to, b) is only doing it out of her sense of duty to the town, and c) is still mourning the loss of her husband. And even though she's decided to lie back and think of England, it's still amazing sex. So of course she feels guilty, because proper ladies aren't supposed to have orgasms. Or enjoy sex.

I don't even know what to say.

Wait, yes I do, but my mom sometimes reads these reviews and I don't want her to know that I know those kinds of words. 

 
Susan. This is not a romance novel. This is a book about a big fat douchebag who manipulates a woman he believes - and tells her this to her face as well as via a PA system in front of the entire town - is undeserving of him in to having sex with him. And she - even though she is supposed to be plucky and smart and witty and funny (and I will concede that yes, she is at times) - agrees with him. This is a book about an entitled asshole preying on a girl with low self-esteem. And on behalf of the millions of girls and women out there who are plucky and smart and witty and funny and also happen to have low self-esteem who have been involved with assholes like that once or twice or eighty times, thanks but no thanks. We've got enough of that in our real lives; we don't need to read about it, too.

Review #32: First Lady, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I downloaded First Lady from the library and it wasn't quite what I expected, but I suppose it was okay. Very middle-of-the-road, fairly predictable, but relatively serviceable.

Cornelia "Nealy" Case is the defacto First Lady to the first bachelor president the United States has had in years. After taking a month to grieve after her husband - the president - was killed (and I can't remember if he was assassinated or just died of...something), Nealy's father (the party chairman) volunteered her to stay on as First Lady, and she reluctantly agreed. Except she's terribly unhappy, so she conspires to escape, and outsmarts the Secret Service by donning a grey wig and old lady clothes, and slips out with a White House tour group. On the other side of the story, we have Mat Jorik, a journalist who feels as though he has sold out to tabloid television and is looking to repair his reputation. But before he can do that, he's tapped to help settle the estate of his ex-wife, who has died and left behind two daughters, fourteen year old Lucy and a young baby who remains pretty nameless throughout the book. The girls aren't his, but Mat's sense of decency can't leave them behind to foster care, so he packs them up in a run-down Winnebago and they set off to their grandmother's house in Iowa. When Nealy, who by this point is disguised as a pregnant woman down on her luck, has her car stolen at a truck stop (which Mat sees happen, and totally sits back and lets it, by the way), he allows her to hitch a ride with him as long as she helps to care for the girls. Of course, it isn't long before they run in to trouble, and eventually Nealy must confess to her subterfuge and go back to the public eye, and the family she and Mat have cobbled together falls apart, as well as any relationship they may have been able to salvage.

I can't decide how I feel about this book. On the surface it's a perfectly serviceable romance novel, although there isn't a whole lot of chemistry between Nealy and Mat. But it's just... dull. And Mat is kind of an asshole. (Also, what's with the one T in his name?) I'm finding that most of Phillips' men are kind of assholes. And upon more reflection, her leading ladies are usually drawn as pretty buttoned up and prissy. Plus, there are plot holes all over the place. Am I supposed to believe that the First Lady of the United States managed to sneak out of the White House by joining a tour? How did she get from her suite to the tour group without tipping off the Secret Service? Granted, the only knowledge I have of Secret Service procedures comes from The West Wing, but I'm pretty sure Dr. Abigail Bartlet wasn't allowed to wander willy nilly about the White House grounds without an escort. And those tours are pretty small, my guess is that it would be noticed if someone extra showed up, even if it was a sweet old lady. Phillips should have gone with the whole underground tunnel thing like in the movie Dave. 

I was going to give this one three stars because I always feel bad giving a bad review, but I've decided to downgrade it to two stars. Between this and that stupid Heaven, Texas book, I'm officially breaking up with Susan.

Review #31: Dumplin', by Julie Murphy

Dumplin' showed up in a few reviews a few weeks ago and it sounded like something right up my alley, so when it appeared on my library's digital download site, I snapped it up and read it in about two or three days. You guys. It's fantastic. 

In Clover City, Texas, the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant is just about the biggest thing in town. Willowdean's mom, a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet, is the head of the pageant, and she prides herself on being able to zip herself in to her winning gown each year. Naturally, one would think Will is a shoo-in to be this year's queen, except that Will is fat. We never find out just how fat she is, but it's made clear from the beginning that she is definitely not a size 4. This seems not to bother her, who appears to be pretty at home in her own skin, a feat that most teenage girls, and, let's face it, not a few adult women, struggle with, but it (very obviously) bothers her mother, whose own sister and Will's beloved Aunt Lucy died about six months ago from what is intimated in the book of some sort of obesity-related issue.

But then Will meets a boy, Bo, cute, private school, mysterious, athletic Bo, who gives her her first kiss and red candy suckers and most definitely likes her, even though he is way out of her league. Confusingly, rather than raising her self-confidence, being on Bo's arm has the opposite effect. Her relationship with her best friend Ellen starts to go a little bit sideways when Ellen begins working at the local clothing boutique that caters exclusively to sizes in to which Will will never fit. And suddenly, Will isn't sure she's as comfortable with herself as she professes to be. Rather than allow herself to shrink in to a wallflower, Will does the scariest thing she can think of: she enters the pageant. With her late aunt's friends - Dolly Patron loving drag queens who steal every scene they are in - helping her along the way, Will not only enters the contest, but convinces several other girls to do so as well, girls who are not the traditional blonde haired, blue eyed beauty queens Texas is so well known for. 

Murphy nails every bit of Will's story. From her bravado about being comfortable in her own skin to her burning desire to both be left alone by and loved by her mother to her nervousness about Bo kissing her and her disbelief that he really likes her, Willowdean rings exactly true. Even the romance is perfectly drawn, with all of the nervousness and confusion and butterflies of first love, along with some hidden sweetness from Bo, who could have been too good to be true, but Murphy gets him exactly right, too. I'm not her target audience (by about twenty five years - ack!), but Murphy spoke to me like Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt did all those years ago.

Turn on Miss Dolly Parton and put Dumplin' in to the hands of every teenage girl you come across.

Review #30: The Lifeboat, by Charlotte Rogan

Both JB and Boss read The Lifeboat and I think that they both liked it more than I did, although I just asked Boss and he said after having been away from it for awhile, he felt it was fine but kind of flat. JB said it was a fascinating look at human behavior, and I suppose he's right, but it just didn't set me on fire the way I think it did him. I think that this is one of those books that you have to be in the right mood to get everything you can out of it, and I suppose I just wasn't in the right mood. Plus, I really hated the main character, which Boss says is a dumb rule, that I have to like the characters, but I can't stand unlikable narrators, and I find that it colors the whole book for me.

It's the summer of 1914. It's been two years since the sinking of the Titanic, and in that time, Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated, World War I has broken out in Europe, and the Germans have sunk the passenger ship Lusitania. Twenty-two year old Grace and her newly minted husband Henry board the Empress Alexandra for passage across the Atlantic, Henry glad-handing and laying the foundation for some business deals, with Grace reflecting on how lucky she is to have landed such a wealthy husband. When an explosion rocks the ship, Henry presses Grace in to a lifeboat, telling her he'll catch the next one, and before she knows it, she's being lowered in to the cold Atlantic with 38 other people. It quickly becomes evident that the lifeboat is not designed to hold 39 passengers and over the next three weeks, the lifeboat will lose its share of passengers in a variety of ways before they are rescued, and it's these losses that land Grace - and others - on trial for murder. 

Grace is an unreliable - and extraordinarily unlikable - narrator. Everything is told in her voice, through her lenses, and so the reader never feels as though they are getting the real story, only what Grace has concocted (or her lawyer has told her to say), and it goes without saying that she's painting herself in the best light possible. Perhaps that's what was Rogan was going for, but it was a style that left me feeling uneasy. And as Grace told her story so dispassionately, I found myself caring less and less about who survived and under what circumstances the passengers were rescued. (And frankly, a little disappointed that Grace survived when so many others didn't.)

But despite my intense dislike for Grace, I found the overall theme of The Lifeboat fascinating, even if I didn't necessarily find the actual book all that fantastic. The real story isn't about whether Grace is telling the truth, or whether Mr. Hardy really was hiding something, or whether Mrs. Grant really is guilty of murder. No, the real story is about what happens when we strip away the bonds of human decency and have to fight for our individual survival, even if it means bringing harm to others. We all like to pretend that we'd be the bigger person, the one to jump overboard when the boat becomes too full, the one to give up our ration of food or fish or water to the weaker in the group. But would we really? In the end, aren't we all survivors - animals, really - and wouldn't we, absent any law and order or societal norms, return to that animal-like state and do anything necessary to ensure our own existence?

The Lifeboat was fine. It has the potential to make a great movie (Anne Hathaway is rumored to be playing Grace, although there is no shooting schedule yet), but as a novel, it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.