If Sarah Palin is the bespectacled banshee of the Republican party, then Laura Bush, the current first lady, is its smiling sphinx: an elegant woman who can remain serene even as the man she married drives both friends and foes into fits of partisan fervour. Despite seven years in the public spotlight, Laura, the former librarian who once famously commanded her dissolute husband, George W Bush, to stop drinking, remains as inscrutable as the portraits that adorn the White House walls.

Curtis Sittenfeld seeks to fill in the blanks in American Wife, her third novel. “Loosely inspired” by the life of Laura Bush, it chronicles the rise of Alice Lindgren from a small Midwest town to the world's most visible residence. Despite a healthy dose of apple pie, there is plenty of tumult in Alice's youth, including a peek at closeted homosexuality, an unwanted pregnancy and a terrible car accident in which Alice causes the death of the boy of her dreams (the last incident is taken almost directly from Laura's own life).

Everything changes when Alice meets the charming if crude Charlie Blackwell, the son of a former Wisconsin governor. Sittenfeld's book is at its best in describing the turbulent early years of Alice's marriage, as an increasingly hard-drinking Charlie lurches from failure to failure in an effort to find his place in a famous family. The novel concludes in the White House in the waning days of Charlie's administration, when Alice is forced to confront both her own hidden past and her husband's unapologetic responsibility for a disastrous war.

Although occasionally entertaining, Sittenfeld's excessively long novel fails to shed much light on its mysterious subject. Alice possesses all the attributes of a beguiling heroine (hidden secrets, romantic entanglements, moral quandaries), but the author proves unable to breathe much life into her. This is due primarily to a bland, overly detailed prose style that drains the excitement from even the most dramatic scenes, such as that fatal car wreck.

Sittenfeld's decision to relocate the action from Texas to Wisconsin is a strategic error, replacing all that outsize Lone Star passion with sleepy Midwestern rectitude. The book's biggest disappointment, however, is Charlie, whose belching, braying antics keep him from becoming anything more than a suburban buffoon. Any woman can marry one of those - what we really want to read about is the wife who sleeps nightly beside a man who can send thousands to their deaths without a moment's self-doubt.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Doubleday £11.99 pp576

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