Over at Slate, Curtis Sittenfeld, who recently wrote the terrific American Wife, has the first of a five-part novella about the inauguration. Here's the first paragraph:

Standing in the arrivals area of the Philadelphia airport, waiting for her 77-year-old Aunt Lettie to come into view, Patrice thinks that it's not that she wasn't thrilled about the outcome of the election—of course she was, how could she not be?—nor is it that she wasn't planning to celebrate the inauguration. It's just that she wasn't planning to attend it. She'd seen the news reports: up to 2 million people converging on the capital. Ten thousand charter buses and 11,000 U.S. troops and (this to Patrice was the biggest deterrent) more than 12,000 porta-potties. Both blessed and cursed with an acute sense of smell, Patrice has more than once, when alone and walking by a construction site, actually crossed a street to avoid passing within a few feet of a porta-potty's stench. And besides that, what would any normal person, without special access, be able to see at the inauguration? The question wasn't whether you'd have a view of the swearing-in but whether you'd even have a view of a Jumbotron.

It's no American Wife, I can tell you that, but I still want to see where it goes. I love the idea of serial stories timed to current events; I hope to see more of them. I do recommend, though, not listening to Sittenfeld reading her own work. She sounds like a one-of-a-kind combination of whiny and snotty. I kind of want to smack her with every single sentence.