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- Contents Category: Fiction
- Custom Article Title: Judith Armstrong reviews 'The President's Wife' by Thea Welsh
- Review Article: Yes
- Article Title: Republican plot
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It is surprising how many people seem to think that reviewers read only the first and last chapters of books to which they will devote several hundred words of critique. They look sceptical when informed that critics read every word of, and often go beyond, the featured book, searching out earlier works by the same author or books on the same subject by other writers. Thea Welsh being previously unknown to me, I have now read one of her earlier novels, and a memoir, but not her prize-winning first novel, The Story of the Year 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins (1990).
The memoir, The Cat Who Looked at the Sky: A memoir (2003), was about ‘three cats, two households and the great truths of life’, according to the blurb. It does not appear to have much in common with Welsh’s new novel, The President’s Wife: Welcome Back (1995), however, was very relevant. Briefly, the novel is about Janey, an upwardly mobile Sydney woman who harnesses fierce ambition to more than one stroke of luck in her pursuit of a cherished goal. This is to become president of the charity committee that puts on Sydney’s social event of the year, the élite and glamorous Goldfish Ball. Although Janey is considered ‘too young’ and inexperienced, she is nevertheless successful. Her apotheosis occurs on the night to which all her efforts have been bent: seated on an elevated ‘throne-like chair’, she is ‘happily aware that she looked quite imperial in her emerald-and-pearl necklace and her green taffeta evening-gown’.
- Book 1 Title: The President's Wife
- Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $32.99 pb, 432 pp
Unhappily, these lines, whose style is typical of a novel which is little more than an exercise in sustained superficiality, are not a send-up. They could well be a practice-run for The President’s Wife, in which another too young woman sets her sights somewhat higher than running a ball. Beth Wilford, from Rosshire, the smallest state in America, falls in love with Marshall Avery, who is campaigning for the presidency of the United States. In a situation that shrieks ‘JFK meets Lady Di’, Beth, rather improbably, sleeps with Avery soon after they meet and, despite her youth, is immediately declared by his entourage to be the perfect wife for the forty-something Republican candidate.
The queen-making manoeuvres are a foretaste of what is to come. Beth and Avery marry, Avery is successfully elected, the two move into the White House and produce a couple of daughters, almost without exchanging a personal word. Avery is too busy, first with the campaign, then with running the country, to talk to anyone but his aides. Beth realises that she has married not a husband but a figurehead; her fairytale marriage was simply an election stratagem set in place by the highest echelons of the Republican Party. Should the reader laugh or cry? Welsh, too commit-ted to following the myriad twists and turns of her eventful but unengaging plot, offers little guidance. Her fertile but facile imagination allows her to start a dozen hares and introduce scores of characters, but none of them is run to ground, if by that we mean some probing of the moral significance of political activities, or the hidden depths and complexities of human nature. All but a few characters (not including Beth) are wooden or venal, their talk self-seeking and banal. Even the grammar is at fault. The author seems unaware that the use of either/or presupposes two alternatives, not three or more, or that ‘I’ cannot be the object of a verb, even when preceded by ‘Marshall and …’
It is hard to know whether Welsh has simply failed to live up to the promise of her first novel, or whether her interest in celebrity, be it the Goldfish Ball or the White House, has seduced her against her better judgement. She does not fully condone the ambitions of her shallow, flaky heroines, but at the same time she neither condemns nor arouses sympathy for them. Perhaps the rationale is not the women them-selves but the fact that their ambitions allow a peep into the machinations of high society. And perhaps those readers who suffer these cravings do want more than can be gleaned from the pages of a glossy magazine.
Why, then, do they not try a well-researched biography? If that sounds too much like hard work, there is at least one page-turning novel on a similar theme. Curtis Sittenfeld’s The American Wife (2008), generally taken to be a fictionalised account of the life of Laura Bush, ran the usual gamut of high praise and dismissive put-down; but Joyce Carol Oates, in the New York Times Book Review, not only described it as entertaining but read it as a potential parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency. The ‘American wife’, she writes, ‘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’. Sadly, The President’s Wife is far from this kind of parallel.
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