Novel: American Wife

In an exclusive excerpt from her new novel, American Wife, inspired by the life of Laura Bush, Curtis Sittenfeld offers a glimpse into a Waspy enclave and its reigning family, the Blackwells. Our heroine, Alice Lindgren, has just become engaged to Charlie Blackwell, and the happy couple is driving up to Charlie’s summer place for a weekend of cocktails, tennis round-robins, and family intrigue. Excerpted from American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld, to be published on September 2, 2008, by Random House; © 2008 by the author. – Vanity Fair.Com

I had bought a basil plant in a small terra-cotta pot to give as a hostess present to Charlie’s mother, but we were less than halfway to Halcyon when I began to question my selection. This second-guessing occurred right around the time I came to understand that Halcyon, Wisconsin, was not, as I had previously assumed based on Charlie’s passing references, a town. Rather, Halcyon was a row of houses along a 700-acre eastern stretch of the peninsula that was Door County, and in order to own a house, you had to belong to the Halcyon Club. Apparently, you became a member by being born into one of five families: the Niedleffs, the Higginsons, the deWolfes, the Thayers, and the Blackwells. Charlie’s first kiss, he explained cheerfully, had been with Christy Niedleff, when he was 12 and she was 14; Sarah Thayer, the matriarch of the Thayer family, was the sister of Hugh deWolfe, the patriarch of the deWolfes; Hugh deWolfe and Harold Blackwell, Charlie’s father, had been roommates at Princeton; Emily Higginson was the godmother of Charlie’s brother Ed; and those were about all the intramural details I managed to retain, though there were many, many more, and Charlie shared them with increasing zest the closer we got to our destination. The families had purchased the land together in 1943, he said; they each had their own house, their own dock, and everyone took their meals at a jointly owned and maintained club. Oh, and the Halcyon Open would occur that weekend, the long-standing tennis competition for which a silver trophy vase sat on the mantel in the clubhouse and on whose surface the men’s singles and doubles champions’ names were engraved each year: Charlie had won singles in 1965, 1966, and 1974, and he and his brother Arthur had won doubles in 1969.

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