American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

"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....Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous -- as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet American Wife might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the "American wife" is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections -- the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide "love" excuses all."

- Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review