This is a curious book. Joyce Carol Oates called Curtis Sittenfeld's third book, American Wife: A Novel , her most ambitious project. I might agree with her there. But I'm not sure I agree that the ambitionof this novel quite followed through. American Wife is about Alice, a small town girl who lives a dull, normal life. As a teenager, she kills a classmate in a car accident. She eventually because a librarian. At 31, she meets Charlie Blackwell, a loveable but somewhat dim man who has inherited fortune as part of a well known political family name. They marry. They falter. He buys a baseball team. He drinks. He stops drinking. And he eventually becomes President of the United States. Sound familiar? That's because Alice's story mimics that of former first lady Laura Bush. Sure, Charlie works in meat packing and lives in Wisconsin. But there is no way to not see the similarities, right on down to Laura causing the death of a classmate in a car accident. Sittenfe