american wife

I just finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, American Wife: “a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life on an American first lady.”  And oh, how I loved it.  The writing is so fine.  The dialogue is so crisp and smart, the inner landscape of the main character is so textured and complicated.  The story felt completely real to me.  I read the first of four sections with tears in my eyes for page after page, and then, by the last section, I was toting the book with me everywhere–pulling it out at stoplights, walking and reading in the halls of my son’s school at pick-up, and, this afternoon, letting my kids make a potion out of a mushed-up hard-boiled egg and a cup of orange juice.  All so I could keep reading.