Unlike her husband, Laura Bush seems poised to slip out of the White House unscathed. Not so fast. Curtis Sittenfeld has written a novel based on the first lady that blends fiction with fact, prompting this question. “Does the president’s wife have a right to her own good name?” Not when there are books to sell.

Sittenfeld puts the fictional Laura, called Alice Blackwell, into squalid bathroom and bedroom scenes. The shock value is not the scene, but that it involves the first lady. Sittenfeld harbors a juvenile fascination with bodily functions (one retching scene per book would more than suffice). Another indignity occurs at a clinic where Alice has an abortion.

It is more than possible that none of these things actually took place in the life of Laura Bush. But now they will be engraved in the public consciousness as if they had. Sittenfeld claims to admire the first lady, but with friends like these. . . .

The story revolves around a factual, life-altering event. As a teen, Laura Bush ran a stop sign and accidentally killed a young man whom she had liked. Sittenfeld uses this incident to explain the dignified, inscrutable woman the public has seen.

When Kennedy is assassinated, she has Alice realize that the people in her small town have a much larger tragedy to absorb, and hence she feels a “grim relief . . . it eclipsed the dreadfulness of what I had caused. Not in my opinion, but in everyone else’s; it made what I’d done seem small . . . there was no part of it that was my fault. If this was not absolution, it was as close as I would get.” Alice feels ashamed of her reaction, but it is human, honest, and insightful.

Here and there, the writing is polished. The dialogue between husband and wife sounds fizzy and authentic as it portrays an enduring marriage. And certain minor characters are likable and convincingly drawn.

Yet there is an annoying quality to American Wife that I noted in Sittenfeld’s earlier novels, always written in the first person: There is a sanctimonious overlay to the voice that does not completely mask a baffling grandiosity. Descriptions of Alice as a mother are cloying, even though the perfect daughter seems modeled on Chelsea Clinton.

Sittenfeld is a highly praised, best-selling author. Other writers (according to the publisher’s advance publicity) are calling her “brave” for taking on the wife of a sitting president.

I am no fan of the Bushes, but I call it a cheap shot.

jimandy111@cox.net