Mrs. Nixon

Unlike numerous other first ladies before and after her, Patricia Nixon, wife of arguably the most despised president in US history, never wrote a memoir detailing her experiences in the White House. In fact, she had a general reputation for being remarkably reserved, even camera-shy. Taking this introverted aspect of her personality as a kind of challenge, Ann Beattie has set out in Mrs. Nixon to imagine the inner life of her subject, only to make a jumbled mess of it. Finding almost immediately from the scant evidence available that her prey will not be easily captured, Beattie turns instead to a string of windy chapters addressing the ways in which her favorite writers—Raymond Carver and Anton Chekov, primarily—have dealt with the challenges of handling ambiguity or characters that don't easily reveal themselves to the writer's imagination. She punctuates these with fictionalized chapters in which she demonstrates the variety of ways in which she can handle what little she knows about Mrs. Nixon. These amount to, among other things, internal monologues told from Mrs. Nixon's perspective that are meant to express her loneliness and longing, imagined letters that Beattie might receive in response to her portrayal of the Nixons, a series of captions for imaginary photographs, even an Oulipo exercise in which meaning is garbled for no apparent reason and to no apparent end. Beattie starts this book with little to go on and ends it with nothing substantial. The real mystery is that it exists at all.