Private History

The abdication of personal responsibility--on torture, on the war in Iraq (in which authority was transferred first to Cheney and then to David Petraeus), on the regulation of major economic institutions and, of course, after Hurricane Katrina--will come to be seen, I suspect, as the defining failure of George W. Bush as President. One hundred years from now, historians will scratch their heads and ask themselves the same question that plagues Alice Blackwell: How did this amiable but feckless man ever get to be President? Curtis Sittenfeld has provided a plausible secret history of an American embarrassment--and a grand entertainment. American Wife heralds the end of the Age of Bush, which cannot come too soon.