Book: Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life
Reviewed by: Julie W.
In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Ann Beattie describes talking to a class of 20-somethings about her new book, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines A Life: “As I elaborated…I got a big surprise: while they all knew what Richard Nixon looked like, they had no idea at all what his wife looked like. Their not conjuring up any visual image of ‘Mrs. Nixon’ just stopped me dead…”
I’ll confess that I can relate to those students. Richard Nixon cuts a sharp figure in my understanding of modern U. S. history, but Mrs. Nixon? Not so much. (Perhaps this is the fate of First Ladies, though coming to adulthood in the age of Hillary Clinton and now Michelle Obama, it seems impossible these major American figures could so quickly fade into the background.)
This makes me an unexpected audience for the original and experimental literary endeavor that is Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life.
To be honest, when I first read the jacket copy for this book – a reconstruction of “…dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view,” which is then compared to Stephen King’s On Writing and said to offer, “…a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer,” – I allowed that I may very well be picking up a train wreck of a book. So is it a biography? A novel? A book of writing advice?
Mrs. Nixon is, masterfully, beautifully, all three of these things (and not one bit a train wreck). Beattie manages to move from fiction to first person writing instruction to nonfiction paragraphs about the documented life of Pat Nixon without misstep.
Beattie spends time analyzing the process of writing a fictional account of a historical figure, asking “What ways of treating a recognizable person are fair game when you’re writing fiction?” Her answer seems to be by approaching the figure from all angles, considering her in her most famous public moments (standing by her husband as he waves to the press and boards the plane that will permanently take them away from the White House); in moments her research has uncovered (she includes a whole chapter of ‘The Quirky Moments of Mrs. Nixon’s Life’, as taken from Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s memoir); and moments she’s entirely made up (‘Moments of Mrs. Nixon’s Life I’ve Invented <On the theory that facts can provide only so much information, and fiction has similiar limitations>’).
This approach allows her great freedom. As she explains, “When writing about a well-known person after that person’s death…the writer is largely constrained by facts.” What I found enjoyable about this book was how much Beattie did not allow herself to be constrained, while also remaining hyper-aware of all that is known to be true about Mrs. Nixon (and educating someone like me, for whom it was largely all new information, along the way.)
What prevents this book from becoming painfully self-referential and some kind of awful meta-fiction/nonfiction hybrid affair is Beattie’s ability to pull away to observe the larger dynamics of writing. She is by all means an author obsessed with her subject, but pairing that obsession with technical instruction prevents it from becoming overbearing. Injecting fictional pieces also helps. There is no better way to teach than by example, so when Beattie follows a chapter on the perils of writing dialogue with a dialogue-heavy piece (which is also entertaining – let’s not ignore the obvious item here – Beattie’s short fictional pieces are what you would expect from a writer of her caliber and will be appreciated by her fans) it braids the book’s goals together in a way that is keenly satisfying to the reader.
Chapters like ‘Mrs. Nixon on Short Stories’ and ‘Mrs. Nixon Reads the Glass Menagerie’ also work to unify the book’s various ropes. By analyizing Mrs. Nixon’s story, Beattie analyzes the way stories are told – by everyone from Carver to Hemingway to Chekhov to Mrs. Nixon herself.
There’s a lot more to this book, which is as layered and complicated as its famous subject. It’s like no other reading experience I’ve had. It’s not quite King’s On Writing, and it’s not quite a collection of typical Beattie short stories, and it’s certainly not a straight forward biography, either. This book is something else entirely, something all its own, an impressive melding of genres that reinvents the possibility of what a book can be.
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