Constant Reader

It can be difficult to read fiction during the autumn of an election
year. In 2004, the last time the election was the most important
in American history, fiction sales fell drastically in at least one
major Seattle bookstore as sales of political books soared. It’s hard
to entertain flights of fancy when images of neocon-inspired
apocalyptic death are dancing in your head. But only reading books
about the election between now and November is a surefire way to wind
up in the booby hatch. The solution, then, must be to read fiction
about politics.

Roland Merullo’s American Savior is speculative fiction about
Jesus Christ returning and running for president on an
independent ticket. It’s almost definitely not the first time someone’s
written a book about the idea, but it’s the first one this year, when
McCain/Palin confederates are releasing ads implying Obama is the
Antichrist.

It’s a shame Merullo does so little with it. A few of the
gags—Jesus rides a wild bull at a rodeo to dispel the
belief that he’s too feminine to be president—are surprising, but
too much of the novel ambles down a well-trod path. It doesn’t help
that Merullo’s political worldview is decidedly simple and his
caricatures are far too broad. There are right-wing talk-show hosts
named “Hurry Linneament” and “Bull O’Malley,” which are names that a
seventh grader who just discovered satire might consider hilariously
clever. James Morrow, particularly in his religious sci-fi farce
Only Begotten Daughter, has done some serious, and entertaining,
theological consideration of what Jesus would do if he were alive
today. Merullo simply wallows in cliché.

At first glance, Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife appears to
be that sort of book—a thoughtless, election-year cash
grab—too. It’s a novel about how a thinly veiled analogue for
Laura Bush, who by all accounts isn’t overly religious or conservative
or for the Iraq war, can manage to love a man idolized by only the
most right-wing and evangelical wingnuts in the land. The icky
truth of it is that, like everyone in a relatively healthy lifelong
partnership, she’s wildly sexually attracted to him.

Some of the synonyms are a little precious: The Bush stand-in runs
for president as a “tolerant traditionalist.” But unlike Merullo’s
cardboard cutouts, Sittenfeld does a novelist’s work by making her
characters real humans with doubts and weaknesses and charm. It’s a
moral novel and by extension a political one. The first lady looks back
on her life and reflects on whether she could have changed the world:
“Anyone who has been married, and especially anyone married for several
decades, knows the union is a series of compromises; to judge
the compromises I have made is, I take it, easy to do from far away.”
She knows that like anything worthwhile, politics seem maddeningly easy
from a distance but are complex, and often painful, up close.