Fictionalised portrait of Laura Bush dissolves into dull polemic

BOOK OF THE DAY: American WifeBy Curtis Sittenfeld, Doubleday, 558pp, price £11.99

IS IT possible that how you cope with overwhelming guilt determines the rest of your life? In the psyche that Curtis Sittenfeld has presumptuously invented for Laura Bush in this roman a clef, guilt is a beast, a mentor, a lover and a motivation.

When Bush was 17-years-old, sober and in broad daylight, she ran a poorly placed stop sign in her hometown of Middleton, Texas, and collided with the car of a boy who may have been her childhood crush.

He died instantly of a broken neck. No charges were brought.

Imagine getting over that. Curtis Sittenfeld imagines - for this novel is all about imagining the raw, deep hidden spaces beneath the reticent Laura Bush's public persona - that one never does.

In the form of the fictitious character Alice Lindgren, the future first lady becomes an outsider who gets pregnant by the dead boy's scheming older brother and has an abortion conducted by her grandmother's lesbian lover. This liberal Lutheran democrat then takes refuge in her job as a primary school librarian and, still feeling unworthy, is vulnerable to the advances of aspiring politician Charlie Blackwell (Sittenfeld's version of George W) - the rich feckless, alcoholic, preppie scion of a powerful Republican family. He's difficult to like and no wonder, since Sittenfeld once described George Bush as "at best misguided, and at worst evil".

Yet Sittenfeld's admiration of Laura Bush amounts to a girl-crush. She has stated that there is no one she admires more. From this starting point, the author is determined to paint a portrait of Alice/Laura as a woman who spends the rest of her life trying to balance supporting her husband at the cost of her own integrity, while daily mourning the loss of the love she could have had with the boy who died in the car accident.

There's no better subject for a novel, encompassing as it does sex (lots of sex, much lampooned on certain high-profile websites), guilt, memory, wifehood, motherhood, power and an icy mother-in-law as huggable as a Texas cactus (sorry, Barbara).

Sittenfeld has a compelling, page-turning voice when she is in full imaginative flight, which she is for most of the first half of this 555-page New York Times bestseller. Lapses of pace in the third quarter of the book - where an indulgence in overwriting is evident - may be partly due to the pressure to produce the novel in time for publication coinciding with the Republican National Convention. (Sittenfeld herself told an interviewer that she'd rather wait 20 years to write another novel, rather than be subjected to the pressures she was under writing An American Wife.)

But there really is no excuse for the fourth quarter, set at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Sittenfeld's imagination sits uneasily with what may or may not have been Laura's/Alice's ambivalence about being first lady in an Iraqi baby murdering administration. Unable to reconcile her heroine's beliefs with the reality of history, Sittenfeld allows the novel to dissolve into dull polemic that amounts to an apology aimed at keeping the main character of Alice/Laura sympathetic. This is when the book loses both its moral core and the reader.

Another challenge is the predetermined ending, since the reader knows that Alice and Charlie are bound for the White House. It's an issue the author is aware of because early on, when we meet Hank, the Svengali-minder who will orchestrate the politician's rise to power over the next 20 years, and who sees Alice reading Updike's Rabbit Redux, he tells her the ending. The cleverly conscious parallels with Updike would take another review to list, but the main question is, can a book really be a page turner when the reader already knows what happens?

Can one write a roman a clef inspired by the most powerful man in the world and his first lady without pandering to the extent that one loses a little bit of one's own soul?

One imagines that Sittenfeld, if she were a character in one of her own novels, might feel a little guilty about that.

Kate Holmquist is a novelist and an Irish Times journalist