On January 5th, publisher Scribner confirmed plans to publish Laura Bush’s memoirs for a hefty sum of $1.6 million. Will this autobiography tell the tale of a complicated woman and the painful choices she made in support of her husband’s political ascendancy? Or will this First Lady stick to a familiar narrative of adoring wife and mother, a steadfast partner who stands by her husband through the difficult times?

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld’s fictionalized version of the life and times of Laura Bush, purports to tell the former. The novel explores the life of Alice Blackwell, from her childhood in Riley, WI to her marriage with Charlie Blackwell, the President of the United States in 2007. The last line of Alice’s introduction to her story, “I lead a life in opposition to itself,” promises that the novel will tell the story of a complex woman with strong values that she can neither abandon for her husband and family nor fully realize because of the marriage that she chose.

Unfortunately, Sittenfeld fails to deliver on her introductory promise. Alice Blackwell seems to float through life, along for her husband’s ride. Her journey is interrupted, at least once in each section of the book, by unconvincing moments of clarity concerning her husband, his family, and her own situation.

For instance, after Alice is chastised by her husband’s mother, Priscilla, for taking the housekeeper to the theater, she thinks: “…contrary to what Priscilla had implied, Blackwells did sometimes socialize with their hired help, but it was on the Blackwells’ turf, under circumstances that highlighted their beneficence and largesse without implying that they spend time with these people because they actually enjoyed it.”

Moments like this, scattered throughout the novel, frustrate the reader. How could this woman, very much swept along with her husband and his family throughout the novel, articulate her feelings concerning the Blackwells so clearly? These inconsistent moments, in which Alice seems to understand the motives of those surrounding her all too quickly, sound like Sittenfeld herself, lecturing the reader on what propels families like the Blackwells through life and toward political success.

Alice’s challenges and mistakes are resolved too easily, often by the family and friends she left behind in Riley, WI. As a young woman, Alice suffers a great deal after she kills her potential new love, Andrew Imhof, a young man she has known all her life, in a car accident.

At the age of thirty, Alice brings her new boyfriend, a Vietnam veteran wounded in the war, home for dinner. Her grandmother spends one evening with him and says: “‘It’s clear to me that this [relationship] is about the Imhof boy….You want to trade a dead boy for an injured man, and if I thought it would work, I’d let you try. It isn’t immoral. But it’s unrealistic. Misfortunes don’t cancel out each other.’”

And yet this is Alice’s family’s reaction after the accident that kills her young friend: “Really, almost no one said anything, no one suggested that I see a counselor, not even my grandmother, who was a reader of Freud and Jung….A consensus seemed to have been reached among everyone in [town], including my own family members, that the best thing was simply to not mention it at all.”

These passages reveal the inconsistencies in Sittenfeld’s supporting characters, inconsistencies that produce strangely deus ex machina moments. How can the reader reconcile such different reactions from Alice’s grandmother? Her outspoken, slightly scandalous, obviously educated grandmother hardly comforted her granddaughter after the horrific accident that altered the course of Alice’s young life, yet she spoke quite freely on the subject of Alice’s new boyfriend.

Alice’s grandmother swoops in and delivers a speech on her granddaughters psychological motives, a plot twist not unlike a forlorn love finally announcing his objections to his beloved’s marriage when the minister asks “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” A more subtle author would have allowed her readers to realize on their own that Alice’s reasons for dating the wounded veteran were psychologically questionable. Alice’s grandmother’s deus ex machina pronouncement is too easy: it simply speeds the plot of the novel and the course of Alice’s life.

Despite these unrealistic moments, I adored Sittenfeld’s descriptions of life with the Blackwells, obviously taken from the author’s own experiences in transplanting from the Midwest to a Massachusetts prep school. Even if these descriptions sound like the author’s, rather than Alice’s, voice, they perfectly capture the Blackwells and their lifestyle.

When Alice travels to Halcyon, the Blackwell’s summer home[s] and country club on Lake Michigan, Sittenfeld writes: “Oh, but how they loved their one toilet, their chipped saucers and tarnished picture frames and hard mattresses. They loved this false, selective form of roughing it….of course the deprivations of Halcyon tickled them. They loved them as suburban children love sleeping in a tent in their own backyard.”

The author understands what drives people like the Blackwells and the pressure and competition in a rich, political family. She perfectly renders the description of the Blackwells “roughing it” in Halcyon because she recognizes that people who are never forced to “rough it” can enjoy it in their own, selective way – because they can always return, for example, to the Blackwell’s home in Milwaukee which “evoked a castle” with “hardwood floors, Oriental rugs….[and] seven bathrooms.”

Readers can easily appreciate and even delight in Sittenfeld’s expertly described scenes of the rich and WASPy, but the challenge of American Wife lies in believing that Alice could possibly understand the Blackwells on the level that Sittenfeld obviously does. I cannot reconcile Alice’s quietly left-of-center values and middle class, Midwestern upbringing with her bursts of insight that sounded strangely like Sittenfeld herself.

Alice was supposedly raised, along with her educated grandmother, as a “reader,” a point often emphasized throughout the book. If she grew up on a steady diet of novels, this would explain a sustained and consistent understanding of people, of different characters and motives and reactions in different situations.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, this knowledge intermittently bursts forth from a woman who otherwise seems swept along for the ride that is her life, leaving the reader wondering why she should sympathize with such an unrealistic character.