The One Who Stands by Her Man

I couldn't stop myself. I broke down and read American Wife. I found Prep, Sittenfeld's previous novel, incredibly readable, so I knew this would at the very least be an entertaining diversion.

My understanding is that Sittenfeld researched and wrote the book out of a fascination with Laura Bush, out of a desire to understand her. I can absolutely see that. Here's a woman who seems to be so different from her husband, and a woman who says so little about anything, that it really would be interesting to know who she is, what she stands for. In Sittenfeld's version she's not only a Democrat but a pretty liberal Democrat; she's pro-choice, she's against the war. She's not born-again, and doesn't even practice any organized religion. Is any of this true? Who knows. Sure, it's nice to think so, but this is a work of speculative fiction, and as such perhaps says more about Sittenfeld, and maybe about the book's readers, than it does about Laura Bush.

Because she's quiet, because she's private, she's, in a way, a cipher. Believe that women should stand in the shadows quietly, caring only about children and children's books? You can believe that's the kind of woman she is. Believe that she's incredibly decent, and that if she loves her husband he must be decent, as well? You can believe that, if you want. Believe that she's secretly someone who loves her husband but hates what he stands for? You're also possibly correct. Believe that she's more Rovian than Rove? Have at it.

Because I wasn't looking for real insight into the mind of Laura Bush I enjoyed the novel. It's also essentially fluff, a good diversion. I read it waiting to get to the parts everyone knows about, to see how Sittenfeld would handle them: the deadly crash, buying the baseball team, becoming born-again, etc. In the end, I was left wishing that Bush would actually write a memoir, and that if she would write one that it would be as honest as this work of fiction pretends to be. But of course that will never happen, and instead, at the end, we are left only with our own speculations and desires.

Loss Leader For a Day

It's a foggy morning and I'm stuck at home waiting for delivery of my new washer and dryer. Seems like as good a time as any to talk about Gang Leader for a Day, which I just finished last night. While I applaud Venkatesh's bravery in entering the Robert Taylor Homes to begin with, and his dedication to his fieldwork, and the openness that allowed him to befriend residents of the housing project, the whole book mainly felt self-serving and self-aggrandizing. Here he is, posing on the cover, in a leather coat, standing in the ghetto. Isn't he a cool dude? He's no academic. He's rogue, yo!

Open the cover and then you have the text itself. Why was this published? The fieldwork he describes took place nearly 20 years ago, in a community that has been disbursed (or erradicated, depending on how you look at it). It's not about the actual fieldwork, anyway. This isnt a monograph, it's a memoir, about what a badass grad student he was. The text doesn't satisfy as memoir or autobiography, though, because even though it's ultimately about Venkatesh and not the gang member, it lacks the generic structure of memoir: I begin, I ascend, I lose my way and mess up, I am redeemed. He does realize at some point that he's using these subjects for his own ends, true, but whatever redemption he looked for was certainly lost by trotting these same people out these years later to use as fodder for popular non-fiction.

I understand that this gets at the heart of the dilemna faced not only by anthropologists and sociologists but also documentarians of all stripes: how does my observing change the observed, and how do I ultimately create a document that's not somehow about me? This text ultimately feels confused on this issue. It's about JT and the Black Kings, sort of, it's about being a grad student at U of C, sort of, it's about the lessons of ghetto life and about Ivy life, sort of. Mainly, it's about voyeurism - his fascination with a life unlike the suburban Southern California world of his childhood, and the fascination with the lives of the other that this book's publisher knows that the educated, white, upper middle-class buyer of the text shares with the author.

In other words, I'm implicated too. Gang Leader for a Day isn't the subject; we are.