Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Waiting on Wednesday







Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

This week's pick: Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie

Due out November 15, 2011





Product Description taken from Amazon:

The New York Times Book Review recently hailed Ann Beattie as “a national treasure,” and selected The New Yorker Stories as one of the top 10 books of 2010. Here, Beattie delivers a wholly original work about Pat Nixon—a riveting exploration of an elusive and modern icon and of the fiction writer’s art.
Mrs. Nixon, once a community theatre actress, understood the world, in part, from some of the roles she played. Ann Beattie puts her on stage again, to try to understand what her thoughts may have been—from the perspective of a fiction writer.
Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern first lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon’s wife as “interchangeable with a Martian.” But decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man.
Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts by Nixon’s daughter, and his doctor, to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen King’s On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers an unprecedented glimpse into the imagination of a writer.
Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair calls “irony-laced reports from the front line of baby-boomers’ war with themselves,” packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.

3 comments:

(Diane) Bibliophile By the Sea said...

I like the sound of this one as well.

Anonymous said...

So this is fiction? Like AN AMERICAN WIFE except with Pat Nixon identified? Sounds really interesting. She was such a private person and who doesn't want to know or imagine more than what we knew? Thanks for putting this one on my radar, Tina!

Kristen said...

This sounds really interesting. Thanks for highlighting it!