Is there a distinctly American experience? “The American,” by Henry James; “An American Tragedy,” by Theodore Dreiser; “The Quiet American,” by Graham Greene; “The Ugly American,” by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick; Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” — each suggests, in its very title, a mythic dimension in which fictitious characters are intended to represent national types or predilections. Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that “American” is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which “good” and “evil” are mysteriously conjoined; to be an “American” is to be a kind of pilgrim, an archetypal seeker after truth. Though destined to be thwarted, even defeated, the pilgrim is our deepest and purest American self.

The young heroines of Curtis Sittenfeld’s previous novels “Prep” and “The Man of My Dreams,” like the more mature protagonist of Sittenfeld’s third and most ambitious novel, “American Wife,” are sister-variants of the American outsider, the excluded, disadvantaged, often envious and obsessive observer of others’ seemingly privileged lives. Much acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2005, the tersely titled “Prep” is not a brilliantly corrosive adolescent cri de coeur like J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” still less a powerful indictment of conformist American racist society like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking­bird,” but an unassuming ­coming-of-age memoirist fiction tracing the adventures and misadventures of a Midwestern girl, Lee Fiora, whose good fortune — unless it’s her misfortune — is to be a scholarship student at a prestigious New England prep school called Ault. By her own definition a girl of no more than average intelligence, looks and personality, Lee is yet a sharp-eyed observer of the WASP prep-school milieu, and of her own chronically forlorn presence there; unlike her prep-school predecessor Holden Caulfield, Lee is not a rebel, but one who unabashedly envies, admires and wishes to adulate her more glamorous classmates. If Lee Fiora is a 21st-century American-girl pilgrim of sorts, her quest isn’t for a searing and illuminating truth but a girl’s wish to be “popular” with her peers and to be noticed — to be kissed — by the boy of her dreams, Cross Sugar­man: “I was, of course, obsessed with kissing; I thought of kissing instead of thinking of Spanish verbs, instead of reading the newspaper or writing letters to my parents. . . . But . . . kissing terrified me, as an actual thing you did with another person, and there was no one it would be more humiliating to kiss badly than Cross.”

“Prep” is perhaps most notable for its refusal to make of its protagonist a figure in any way “heroic” — her angst is petty, small-minded, but utterly convincing.

Image Credit... Ellen Lupton

The “American wife” of Sittenfeld’s new novel, conspicuously modeled after the life of Laura Bush as recorded in Ann Gerhart’s biography “The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush” (2004), is a fictitious first lady named Alice Blackwell, née Lindgren, a Wisconsin-born former grade school teacher and librarian who comes belatedly to realize, in middle age, at the height of the Iraq war that her aggressively militant president-husband has initiated and stubbornly continues to defend, that she has compromised her youthful liberal ideals: “I lead a life in opposition to itself.” As a portraitist in prose, Sittenfeld never deviates from sympathetic respect for her high-profile subject: she is not Francis Bacon but rather more Norman Rockwell. Nearness to the White House and the egomaniacal possibilities of presidential power have not inspired this novelist to wild flights of surreal satire as in the brilliantly executed Nixon-inspired fictions of a bygone era, Philip Roth’s “Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends)” (1971) and Robert Coover’s “Public Burning” (1977). There are no stylistic innovations in “American Wife” and very little that is political or even historical. Sittenfeld’s prose here is straight­forward and unobtrusive, lacking even the wry asides of the girl-narrators of “Prep” and “The Man of My Dreams,” whose powers of observation are sharpened by their chronic low-grade depression; Alice is never ­other than “good” — “selfless” — stricken by conscience as she looks back upon the life that has become mysterious and problematic to her, like a life lived by someone not herself: “Was I mutable, without a fixed identity? I could see the arguments for every side, for and against people like the Blackwells” (her husband Charlie’s wealthy, politically influential family). “Charlie . . . had told me I had a strong sense of myself, but I wondered then if the opposite was true — if what he took for strength was a bending sort of accommodation to his ways.”