Real dirty laundry
Two ripped-from-the-headlines novels surpass biography
Kerry Clare
American Wife, the latest by novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, has been stirring up a buzz in the U.S. for its fictionalized portrayal of George and Laura Bush-its liberties with the Bushes' personal lives, Sittenfeld's nerve at ripping a story from the headlines, and the explicitness of the sex scenes. Critics marvelled that any author could stomach such imaginings.
But though the George W. Bush sex is truly one-of-a-kind, American Wife is not the only recent novel flaunting conspicuous similarities to reality. In a publishing market saturated by nonfiction, it's almost inevitable that the stuff would leak in everywhere. In his new novel, Entitlement, Canadian writer Jonathan Bennett similarly blends fact with fiction to critique the establishment, and though his approach is subtler than Sittenfeld's, the result is a story whose target could be anyone.
Entitlement is fast-paced and plot-driven, complete with the requisite crooked cop and dead body. Real Canadian nonfiction is rarely this readable (unless it involves Julie Couillard). And yet, being Canadian, as polite as we like to imagine we are, it makes sense we'd skewer our bluebloods behind the thin veil of fiction.
The establishment in question here is the Aspinalls, a powerful family "as close to British royalty as Canada can ever hope to get." Set among the upper-crustiest of Upper Canada-that world of private schools, Muskoka sailboats, and trust funds-Bennett's book follows would-be biographer Trudy Clarke on her hopeless quest to untangle the Aspinall family's secrets, ignoring warnings that Stuart Aspinall "ruins people he doesn't like."
Of course, such a book-within-a-book has plenty of real-world precedents: books about families with names like Bronfman, Rogers, Asper, Thomson and Black (some of them not even authored by Peter C. Newman). They're all in the vein of the "serious nonfiction" Bennett's biographer is trying to create, and the fact that she ultimately fails at the task slyly undermines and satirizes these books' blustery authority.
But although Entitlement is fiction, I still couldn't help wondering whom, among Canada's most powerful families, the Aspinalls were supposed to represent. I couldn't have been the only reader trying to place the private school-is "Lord Simcoe College" actually Trinity College School, or UCC, or Lakefield College? Or who noticed the similarity between the name "Aspinall" and certain others. Bennett's references to actual news outlets and events, as well as his plays on biographical structures, all bring his novel close to life.
Such an overlap between fiction and the real world is purposeful, a contemporary nod to the long history of the roman ˆ clef-literally, from the French, a "novel with a key,"-a fictionalized portrayal of real events.
It would take an American, however, to be as brash as Curtis Sittenfeld, who acknowledges her character, Alice Blackwell, is "loosely inspired" by Laura Bush. "Loose" is perhaps an understatement in this case, considering the fact that Alice is a librarian, her husband wins a surprise 2000 election victory, and that he goes on to start a war in a faraway country.
The basic biographical similarities, however, cease to be the details that matter, because Sittenfeld has invested her characters with singular intricacy. In Joe Klein's Primary Colors, Jack Stanton could only ever have been Bill Clinton, but as Alice Blackwell tells her story, she becomes herself entirely, and Laura Bush fades away.
Both novels are presenting biography and autobiography as inherently unreliable. In Entitlement, Trudy Clarke soon realizes that she's never going to get all the answers, that the truth is an unstable force; Alice Blackwell makes it clear in her fictional autobiography that there is still much she'll never tell.
This straightforwardness is the reason these novels resonate. We get a sense of certainty here that we could never have in nonfiction. This is so unlike the "truth" of biography and autobiography, which usually only serves to suit whoever's doing the talking, and is always due for reconsideration when the next "definitive" history book comes out. But as good readers of fiction already know, truth is a matter of perspective.
So, of course, while there's no such family as the Aspinalls, it means something that I pondered them. Considering the Aspinalls and their privileged lives is to acknowledge a Canadian class structure that Bennett shows we are usually blind to. And to slip between the fictional sheets with George W. Bush for a while? If you can get past the ick factor, it's a chance to examine how he ever came to happen-rather than just shaking our heads at the fact that he did. T
