ONE OF THE TOUGHER DAYS in the life of a book section editor must come when he or she receives a review of a book by one of the paper's own writers that the reviewer finds not up to par. Thus, it was especially brave of the Washington Post last Sunday to run a review of "The Perfect Wife," a book about Laura Bush by Post Style writer Ann Gerhart, that gives the book and its author its due. Judith Warner, author of a book about Hillary Clinton, explains that Gerhart comes with a brisk and lively prose style, and a sharp eye for nuance and character. Unfortunately, she also comes equipped with a giant-sized attitude, that turns an ostensible rendition of someone's life story into a political tract.
Let Warner tell it:
Gerhart's "The Perfect Wife" is only partially a book about the life and "choices" of First Lady Laura Bush. What it is really, more profoundly, is an interface between our author, a high-powered working mom (spurred on by like-minded acquaintances--the Washington "many," the in-the-know people . . .) and her subject, a woman whose traditionalist lifestyle stumps, angers and maddeningly provokes Gerhart, inspiring a kind of bilious wistfulness that creeps through on every page.
Does the phrase "dripping with condescension" strike you as excessive? It's not. It describes accurately the slant Gerhart brings to her evocations both of the South and of Texas, and of the 1950s and '60s, in which Laura grew up. Her take on the time resembles that
of the movie "Pleasantville," which starts out in black and white, and then changes to color, as the repressed and benighted '50s suburbanites discover the pleasures of rock'n'roll, drugs, and adultery. Her take on the place is that Texas is a strange asylum populated by childlike folk whom she describes in a sort of white-darky dialect that is every bit as offensive as the original version. Here she is describing Laura's mother, Jenna Welch: "She is much loved, and she gets around quite ably, Jenna does, for a woman born in l9l9." Does she? Lawsy me!
Laura grows up, and one day leaves Texas, but to Gerhart, things only get worse. She marries--the horror--a Republican politician, whose loathsome ideas she is forced to support, if just indirectly, by backing him. Gerhart's view of Bush seems expressed best by someone she describes as a "civic leader" in Austin: "George is a very likeable man if you divorce him from his politics," it being a given that these are uncivilized.
As Gerhart comes to believe that Laura is in fact an intelligent, cultured, sensitive woman, she reads into Laura the beliefs Gerhart thinks are the only ones possible for cultured and sensitive women, which is to say, her own:
Does she doubt policies of her husband's administration, like the wisdom of taking information on condoms off the websites of the Centers for Disease Control or maintaining three strikes legislation for criminals? Does she weep over the destroyed antiquities of the Baghdad Museum? Does she argue in pillow talk for maintaining abortion rights? . . .
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