Oozing Sincerity Poem by gershon hepner

There’s a difference between oozing
sincerity and being quite sincere,
like the difference between boozing
and drinking to create good cheer.

Americans, when they are gothic,
are as different from the Jews
as Philip, when he’s being Rothic,
is from the goyim who don’t ooze.

Joyce Carol Oates reviews “American Wife, ” by Curtis Sittenfield (“The First Lady, ” NYT Book review, August 31,2008) :

“American Wife” is most engaging in its early chapters, when Alice Lindgren isn’t yet Alice Blackwell but an insecure young woman, haunted by the memory of the beautiful boy she’d accidentally killed as a girl yet dedicated to teaching and to a life defined by books. After she meets Charlie Blackwell and becomes his helpmeet, her independence swallowed up in his ambition, Alice seems to lose definition and, especially in the novel’s final, weakest section, titled “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ” to become a generic figure of celebrity proffering bromides to an adulatory public — “Gradually your fame settles on you, it’s like a new coat or a new car that you become used to” — and irritably defending herself against the prying media — “I don’t ooze sincerity. I am sincere.” At the novel’s end, Sittenfeld breaks from the Laura Bush biographies to imagine for her first lady a belated gesture of rebellion regarding the Iraq war that yields but a muted air of conviction… If there is an American gothic tale secreted within “American Wife, ” it’s one of unconscionable, even criminal behavior cloaked in the reassuring tones of the domestic; political tragedy reduced to the terms of situation comedy, in this way nullified, erased. How to take Charlie Blackwell seriously as a purveyor of evil? We can’t, not as we see him through his wife’s indulgent eyes smiling “as he does when he’s broken wind particularly loudly, as if he’s half sheepish and half pleased with himself.” The ideal American wife can only retreat into a kind of female solace of opacity: “For now I will say nothing; amid the glaring exposure, there must remain secrets that are mine alone.”

9/2/08