Book #11: The President's Lady by Irving Stone

This book is a novelization of the love story and lives of President Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel Donelson Jackson. It was pretty fascinating to read about their lives and how they met--and it left me wanting to know for sure what actually happened. At the beginning of the book, Rachel Donelson is married to Lewis Robards, who is a jealous, angry, unstable and abusive man, and despite all of her efforts and attempts at reconciling with him (several times), he casts her out. In the middle of all of these goings-on, she meets Andrew Jackson and becomes friends with him (as he is a visitor staying with her family). After she leaves her husband, they fall in love, and eventually they hear Robards has filed for divorce (which is unheard of). In the end, they get married--but it turns out he didn't really get the divorce, so she'd been a bigamist for the first three years of their marriage. But they managed to survive it and loved each other solidly for their entire marriage--and weathered all of the negative things people could think and say about them in the early nineteenth century way.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this book was most interesting for the first 100 pages. The last half of the book was way, way too long and boring. It's impossible to cover 40 years of marriage in a novel and keep the plot going, keep the readers interested. I really loved reading about how Rachel and Andrew met each other and fell in love, and how they overcame the odds with her ex-husband and her divorce. But the rest of the book was basically all Andrew going away for various things and Rachel missing him, and Andrew fighting over people saying that Rachel was an adulteress for getting a divorce. Over and over and over. If this was a real novel, and not a re-telling of history in fictional form, I would have said to chop it in half. As it was, Stone should have just focused on the first part of their relationship. It really dragged. I seriously skimmed the last 50 pages because I knew exactly what was going to happen... except the ending, when Rachel died before Andrew was inaugurated (which I vaguely remember now). I think that's probably why he included the whole long story--because it's so poignant that she died, probably from all the stresses of being dragged through the mud in Washington society and in the newspapers.

One other thing that really bugged me: I didn't feel like the conversation rang true enough to me. I hate it when I'm reading a conversation characters are having and it feels false and made-up. That sort of thing usually happens in romantic conversations, because so many authors do that badly. I also kind of felt that way about when we were getting a look into Rachel's thoughts as well--is that really a likely thing for her to think?

I don't think I would have read this book at all (I'd never heard of it), except that it's one of the books for the book club which I am wanting to be more involved in (I went once, in November, but haven't made it back since!). Mostly, I think this genre is an interesting one--it's a fictionalization of what really happened in history. This is something I wrote whole papers on in my English major days: what does this really say about what "really" happened? How do we know what is fiction and what is reality? That's what is frustrating to me about this book and this sort of historical fiction (or biographical fiction, as Irving Stone calls it in his preface): I want to know what is "fictionalized" and what isn't. Of course, the language and conversation can't be real, and we have no idea what exactly Rachel was thinking (outside of reading her letters) but the newspaper excerpts included are. Are all the events really as they happened?