The President’s Daughter
by Ellen Emerson White
Some time yesterday or today or tomorrow we’re all going to want a good novel to read*, and in the atmosphere of the moment our thoughts may conceivably be turning toward a good novel with–dunno–presidents or politics or something like that in it.**
A friend told me several months ago, you should read THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER. And she told me, roughly, what it was about. No, I said. I don’t read YA*** and I particularly don’t read books about recognisable this-world kids going to recognisable this-world high schools. I’m old, I’ve read a lot of high school books, when you haven’t been a teenager in nearly forty years you’re allowed to stop, and I’m officially not interested.
You loved LOOKS†, said my friend.
Long pause on my end of the phone. Okay, I said reluctantly. You’re right. I loved LOOKS.
It’s hard to sound smug over the phone, but my friend managed. I’ll send you PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, she said. In fact, I’ll send you the series.
SERIES? I said, but she’d already rung off.
But she was right. I liked THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER a lot.
Meghan Powers, a sophomore in high school when the book opens, is the eldest child and only daughter of Katharine Vaughn Powers, senator from Massachusetts. Meg likes her home, her family, and her school. The one thing she’s a little dubious about is her mother’s career. In the first chapter Meg is meeting her mother at the country club in the affluent Boston suburb where the family lives, and where Meg and her mother have their regular Friday-afternoon tennis match as Senator Powers steps off the plane from DC where she spends most of her working weeks.
But this Friday her mother has something she wants to talk to Meg about:
. . . Her mother took a deep breath ” . . . it’s about the next election.”
Whoa. Meg sat up straighter. “You mean you’re not running?”
“I’m not running for Senate,” her mother conceded.
How completely excellent. “You mean, you’ll like, live at home all the time?” Meg could almost feel her eyes lighting up. . . .
“Meg, I want to run for President,” her mother said.
Meg choked . . . “Are you kidding?”
Her mother shook her head.
“Oh my God,” Meg said. . . .
One of the pleasures of THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER is the steady, low-key humour. The relationship between Meg and her mother–which, loving and touchy, is one of the strengths of the book–is set up from the first scene at the country club:
. . . . Watching her, Meg decided that her mother was the kind of person who made her wish that she had on pumps. Not that Meg could walk in pumps. Not that she really wanted to walk in pumps. . . .
“What happened to all of those nice clothes you got for your birthday?”
“I don’t know,” Meg said, a little self-conscious about the contrast between them. The Senator and the slovenly daughter. “I feel like I’m not supposed to perspire in them.”
Her mother nodded. “No point in ruining good clothes by wearing them.”. . . .
Meg’s first night in the White House, she rings her best friend back in Massachusetts: “I don’t want to start school either,” Meg said.
“My God, Meg, they’re going to be afraid of you,” Beth said.
. . . “But, I’m just normal.”
“Well,” Beth said, “let’s not get carried away.”
And later, she’s quarrelled–unfairly, and she knows she had been unfair–with her mother, and runs away and hides:
She kept running, and then ducked into the Lincoln Bedroom, lying down on the antique bed and wishing that Lincoln’s ghost would come along and carry her off . . . she stayed there for what seemed like a very long time . . . staring up at the chandelier, which she decided that she hated. She hated all of the chandeliers in the house. In fact, she hated every chandelier in the world. . . . She lay there, hating chandeliers. . . .
I have no idea what the stresses on a presidential candidate’s family are, or the stresses on the president’s family, or what living in the White House is like, or what having aides and spin doctors and Secret Service men and women around underfoot all the time is like. I don’t want to: being a professional writer and running this blog is as much of myself as I ever want to flaunt in public. I’d also never thought about it, aside from watching WEST WING–and, lately, the Obamas, because they seem so normal, you know? I voted for Hillary’s husband and I would have voted for Hillary but I could never imagine them as next-door neighbours. I can imagine the Obamas as neighbours.†† It gives what they’ve done and are doing and will do over the next four††† years a rather awful reality: maybe politicians are real people too after all. Pass it on. DAUGHTER made me feel as if it was giving me a guess about what some of the stresses and some of the awfulness and again some of the reality might be like. White also manages to make election night genuinely exciting, which is a good trick since, as you have presumably read the title of the book you’re holding, you know who is going to win.
Generally I’m a prose-style freak: give me a glorious metaphor occasionally and I will follow you anywhere. DAUGHTER doesn’t have that kind of style, but what it does have is a lucid plain-spoken clarity that I found very effective–and very claustrophobic. Good going, Katharine Vaughn Powers, but I’m glad I’m not your daughter.
I haven’t read the other three yet. I’ve been reading big thick nonfiction bricks I mean books and homeopathic journals which I am turgidly inclined to do, but I decided some weeks back that I wanted to write about DAUGHTER around the inauguration, and writing about it, and the party atmosphere of the inauguration–we get tough next week, this week is for free–has prompted me to break out the other three and put them on the top of the teetering mountain of books-to-be-read on and around my bed. For some reason they don’t have their original copyright dates; the first three have been reissued with the new fourth one. But I think the order is: THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER, WHITE HOUSE AUTUMN, LONG LIVE THE QUEEN, and LONG MAY SHE REIGN. But hey, you can order all four, and figure out which goes where after you get them home.
I wonder what Margaret Truman might have thought of them? And I hope someone sends copies to Malia. They might inspire Malia–or Natasha–to write her own in a few years.
* * *
* Well. I’m assuming there aren’t any non-regular-novel-readers on this blog.
** And we’ve already read PRIMARY COLORS and all of Margaret Truman
*** I know, I know. I read everything I can get my hands on of certain select authors. But I have a serious Category Allergy, not least from spending my life trying to get out of the one(s) I’ve been crammed into, but also from watching it happen to other people, till we all look geraniums that have been wearing airbag-lined cardboard boxes against the cold for too long. And it’s pretty true that I don’t read YA unless there are, you know, dragons involved, or at least a few fairies.
† LOOKS, Madeleine George: I wrote a blog entry on it, 27 August last year
†† If they decide to emigrate after Barack’s second term.
††† Or eight. After the new improved Kyoto agreement, the peace in the Middle East, the strong stable global economy, and the publicly funded national health care system for the US so excellent that the creaky British one will promptly start to remake itself to the new American design, there will barely be an election in four years, because all the Republicans will vote for Barack too, and no one will even be able to remember the Republican candidate’s name. Sarah? Moose?
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