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Sex Lies and Laura Bush
Charles Laurence, FirstPost.co.uk
All you never really wanted to know about the sex lives of President Dubya Bush and his famously frosty First Lady Laura is at the core of a novel due to be published to Republican blushes as the flag goes down on the election season this autumn.
It is called American Wife and comes from Curtis Sittenfeld, a woman of 33 whose first novel Prep was the sleeper bestseller of 2003 and a contender for the Orange Prize. It was about sex, romance and upper-crust social hypocrisy as a naive country girl goes to an East Coast 'prep' school.
Random House promises to publish American Wife with very similar themes in time for the Republican nominating convention. No delegate will be looking at the outgoing First Lady in quite the same way.
"His butt was small in the way
that I always forgot a lot of men's were. How could he possibly be an unscrupulous politician with such a cute little butt?"... Or "This is the moment I knew I could love him, when I saw his penis. With the men in my past the penis had seemed an odd creature, both comic and forlorn. But I felt a great devotion to Charlie when I first got a look at his, the ruddy-hued, upward-pointing shaft, its swollen veins and cap-like tip."
Charlie Blackwell is the scion of a blue-blood Yankee family who becomes President, and Alice, the central character, is the quiet librarian who marries him. Charlie also gets rave reviews for cunnilingus with his "bobbing head, and his earnest assiduous lapping".
Sittenfeld makes sure we all know who she is writing about by using known facts before delving into the cauldrons of desire lying just
below the surface. She has Alice at 16 in a freak accident at a road junction in which she kills the high school football star who is her boyfriend. Laura Bush at 17 killed her high school crush in an identical accident.
On the campaign trail in 2000, the real Laura Bush lowered her guard enough to say that the accident "was crushing, for the family involved as well as for me". In American Wife, Alice soothes her grief by having sex with her dead boyfriend's best friend, doggy-style: "He pulled off my pants and underwear at the same time... and then I was naked except for my socks, which were white with lace trim. He tugged me upward and flipped me over, and when he said, 'No, you have to be on your knees,' it was the first time either of us had spoken in several minutes."
If Dubya was still running for office his Religious Right base would be even more shocked by Alice's abortion. "'Isn't it - I hestitated. 'Isn't it illegal?'" Grandma, who has insisted, replies: "'Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can't legislate human nature.'" To make matter worse, young Alice discovers that Grandma is a lesbian when she catches her in flagrante with the abortion doctor.
Sittenfeld, who lives with a boyfriend in Philadelphia, wrote an article for Salon claiming that while her politics were "flaming liberal" and she loathed Dubya's regime, she loved Laura. She described her as "an easy heroine to root for - smart and nice, but just flawed enough (she still sneaks cigarettes!) to remain likeable".
We can only speculate on whether Sittenfeld's novelist instinct for character is as sure as her instinct for a bestseller.
