Curtis Sittenfeld is a name I often hear thrown around - usually associated with great praise. Yet, I have never known where to start with her and all the hype over _Rodham_ left me feeling intimidated. All that has changed with _American Wife_, which I was given by my brother and sister-in-law. This is the perfect example of why you should give books as presents: but for them, I might never have taken the leap with Curtis and I am so grateful that they have shown me the way.

_American Wife_ is described as a “thinly veiled” fictionalised account of Laura Bush, former First Lady of the United States. As someone deeply conscious of their inadequate grasp on American politics, I approached it with some trepidation (perhaps this explains why I shied away from _Rodham_ - which does a similar thing for Hilary Clinton). Those fears were unwarranted, for whilst American politics are unavoidably integral to _American Wife_, it is more than anything the story of a woman (Alice) with both an extraordinary and very ordinary life.

Alice’s life is mapped out by houses: in her childhood home, teenage Alice lives with her traditionalist parents, allied with her mischievous grandmother; single, in her first home of her own and not-quite-thirty, Alice falls irretrievably in love with Charlie; in their first marital home, Alice battles with her alcoholic husband; and finally, in the Presidential home as First Lady, Alice grapples to retain control as her private life threatens to spill over into her very public one.

Both geographically and socially, then, Alice moves from humble beginnings to a life of dizzying privilege. Her account of navigating that journey is both deeply intimate and strangely distant, an effect achieved because the writing, like Alice, is careful and tightly controlled. At its heart, Alice leads a life of restraint: married to a man whose political views she fundamentally disagrees with, she can never tell anyone what she truly thinks, so much so that she admits she had “become my own confidant”.

The strain of leading this secret inner life comes to a head in the final section of the novel. The jump between homes and time periods, which is fairly seamless earlier in the novel, feels most jarring here because Sittenfeld intentionally places Alice at a greater distance from the reader. She does so by reducing the reader’s access to Alice’s inner thoughts, choosing increasingly to present Alice’s public persona instead. Finally, when Alice breaks her reserve and expresses her actual feelings publicly (with severe repercussions on her personal relationships), it is a relief for both Alice and the reader.

In some ways, placing a real life person (who is still alive) at the novel’s center was distracting - I found myself asking whether the events in the book had really happened. But for the most part, I was too compelled by Alice’s personal story to care about the ‘truth’. Perhaps that is Sittenfield’s intention: by painting Alice’s portrait so richly, she reminds us that we can never really know the truth of lives lived in public. And with that thought I think I am brave enough for my next First Lady - _Rodham_, here I come!

“I had become my own confidant” - American Wife - Curtis Sittenfeld 

One of the first, if not _the_ first, experiences I had of ‘close reading’ (which is a critical analysis of a text) was Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. Blessed as I am with a wipe-clean memory, it’s striking how vividly I remember my teacher dissecting the poem line by line, word by word, as he revealed an as-yet-undiscovered and joyous way of reading. Partly for that I spoke about the poem in my University interview and it’s one of the only poems that I can quote by heart. Now Maggie O’Farrell has forged that poem into something fierce and fresh and distinctly O’Farrellian: ‘The Marriage Portrait’ is a haunting re-telling of the story behind Browning’s poem, and one that is painted so starkly in my mind that I am hopeful it too will elude the regular (involuntary) synaptic purging.

We begin in 1561 with Lucrezia and her husband Alfonso (the Duke of Ferrara) as they sit down to supper and Lucrezia realises with “complete certainty” that the Duke her husband “intends to kill her”. From that “wild and lonely place” we are plucked and thrust into the oppressive heat of Florence in 1544 and Lucrezia’s conception. So the pendulum of the narrative is set in motion, and on we swing through time, between Lucrezia’s childhood - overlooked and undervalued, the black sheep of her family - to her first meeting with the Duke, her marriage and its swift decline. We end where we began, with Lucrezia confronted by the murderous intent of her husband.

The prospect of Lucrezia’s murder in the novel’s very first paragraph establishes the sense of menace which seeps throughout the text. This “presence, malign and predatory” is linked inextricably with Lucrezia’s increasing disassociation from herself. Starkly, this disconnection begins on her wedding day: with each layer of marital dress heaped upon her, Lucrezia becomes increasingly passive. Eventually “the dress is on her”; it is the dress that wears her, and its excessive activity (it “rustles.. slides… speaks…scuffs…chaffs…hooks…nibbles…creaks”) highlights Lucrezia’s new state of confinement - she cannot even lift her hands to cover her ears.

The more Lucrezia looks like the Duke’s Duchess, the less she recognises herself: in the mirror on her wedding day she sees “a girl surrounded by a sea of blue and gold” and later the mirror shows a married Lucrezia “not Lucrezia, but someone other”. And yet there is a force in Lucrezia that cannot be snuffed out. The Duke identifies “something at the core of her, a type of defiance”. We see it in her as she creates her secret underpaintings and then hides them under another layer of paint. Like those hidden paintings, Lucrezia’s true self is not erased by the ducal trappings heaped upon her, it is merely covered up. Ultimately, she must cast off those trappings entirely to escape the Duke disguised as her maid.

Throughout, there are nods towards ‘My Last Duchess’: both symbolic - the white mule the Duke gives to Lucrezia recalls the white mule ridden by Browning’s Duchess, and linguistic - the pandering painter, Il Bastiano who could never “find the paint to reproduce the flush along her throat” echos Browning’s similarly sycophantic Fra Pandolf’s words: “Paint/Must never hope to reproduce the faint/Half-flush that dies along her throat”. These allusory overtones serve to add to our sense of dread for Lucrezia - ominously, the Duke’s “first” duchess - who we fear will meet the same end as Browning’s “last” Duchess. In this, Maggie mimics her heroine: like Lucrezia’s paintings, her ‘Marriage Portrait’ is layered and ultimately she usurps Browning’s narrative by saving the Duchess and letting Lucrezia tell her own story.

“A presence, malign and predatory” - The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell

My first post and I’ve learnt an important lesson: write your post when you finish the book and not months afterwards. I read ‘Still Life’ in the haze of summer; I write this in October on a grey and rainy Sunday afternoon. Yet when I finished it, I knew ‘Still Life’ was my book of the year and that’s why it has to be ‘Still Life’ for my first post, even if it has taken me months to get here.

And what a treat it is on this cold, rainy day to return to the warmth and joy of this book. Largely set in the aftermath of WW2, we follow Ulysses the son of a globe-maker and his band of eccentrics as they battle on in a run-down pub in East London. It’s a thin post-war existence and they are clinging on, clinging to each other, barely surviving.

Then their break comes and they leave London for Italy and the unknown - two men (one in shorts), a kid, a parrot and a suitcase full of cash piled into one van, an unlikely band of misfits off on a great adventure. In Florence, Ulysses’s heritage comes into its own as he rediscovers his globe making craft and builds a richer more colourful world for them all.

This is a book about family - how it can be found and forged in the most unlikely places. It’s about friendship and companionship. It thrums with love, in all its forms: the quiet kind and the loud. Like Piano Pete’s post-flood ballad, it’s “about good rising out of need” and “kindness and looking out for one another”.

Winman said of _Still Life_ that she wrote it in the hope that: “someone who’s been bruised by the damage of the last couple of years and who might need to believe again in the goodness of people and a beautiful world might read it”. In that, she’s achieved her aim and more - it’s a soaring, warm, uplifting joy of a book.

Given all of this, it’s no mean feat that Winman ensures that it stays fresh and doesn’t slip into the saccharine. Partly this is down to her quick wit that runs throughout and works to provide emotional relief just when, like Cress, you think you might be overcome by “all that love”. It’s also down to the dialogue that zings as she moves with agility between her characters’ distinctive voices.

That pace is important as the narrative spans the arc of its characters’s lives. It feels like Winman is conscious of this and works hard to build a rhythm to sweep you up with her and them. She licks up phrases that reappear and reform over and over, imbuing her characters with a recognisable music of their own: “clack clack clack .. hips swaying, arms swinging”, you recognise Peg and her tune before she sashays into the scene.

Winman trained as an actor before becoming a novelist and this training has perhaps contributed to making her dialogue so sharp. She is also at times unapologetically cinematic: the prose is interrupted with a “Click!” and a “Flash!”, as characters are “caught forever” on camera and she forces her readers to stop and really picture (!) the scene.

Into this, Winman weaves in strands of the whimsical: Claud the parrot (my favourite character) with his preternatural disposition to one liners and surviving Colin’s wrath and Cress’s “visions” that result in well-timed windfalls are particular delights.

All this makes for an unusual combination and (with regret) I admit that not everyone I have recommended this to has loved it like I have. It’s undeniable that her style is busy - words fall onto and run into each other and it can leave you gasping to keep up - this takes some acclimatisation and some stamina, given the sweeping arc of the book.

I’ve often heard Winman compared to marmite. Luckily for me, like that delicious yeasty spread, I’m ready to dip my spoon in and lick it all up.

The Book Gobbler

“I had become my own confidant” - American Wife - Curtis Sittenfeld

“A presence, malign and predatory” - The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell

“All that love!” - Still Life - Sarah Winman