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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In her propagandistic novel "Amanda Bright@home," right-wing pundit Danielle Crittenden extols the virtues of early marriage, the free market and having a "mighty tree" as a husband.
May 31, 2003 | In an interview with the National Review about her just published first novel, "Amanda Bright@home," right-wing social critic Danielle Crittenden explained that she felt driven to create her own fiction after reviewing several unnamed "feminist novels." "I have had few more depressing literary experiences," she complained. The plots were "formulaic," always culminating with a "totally virtuous" woman getting up the guts to leave "the piggish husband."
It's hard to imagine, however, that these feminist tomes could be any more depressing than Crittenden's own lugubrious pamphlet, inhabited by characters crafted of the finest ideological hardwood veneers, and singing the praises of early marriage, mothering, the free market and other GOP-approved virtues.
Crittenden's novel tells the story of how her heroine, Amanda Bright, successfully achieves female happiness by following the blueprint drawn up by none other than Crittenden herself, in her 2001 nonfiction manifesto, "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us." The plan goes as follows: Marry young (mid- to late 20s), become stay-at-home mom, reenter the workforce when children enter school (if so desired). As we'll see, this breakthrough solution to the career vs. family dilemma works best if the woman in question has a fairy godmother looking over her career and a husband who comes equipped with large bags of gold.
The novel's plot revolves around Amanda's doubts after she makes the "radical" decision to quit her Beltway P.R. job to take care of her two children. In the climactic moment, Crittenden proves that even the family-values crowd can soar to Mrs. Dalloway-like rhetorical heights: "[Amanda] clings to [her husband's] hand as she clings to the present moment; that's all there is now, the present moment, but it, too, contains everything. It is here, it is this person, it is this life they have created, it is this life struggling within her, it is this love." Before reaching Amanda's blowsy epiphany, readers meet an endless procession of stereotypes who are impossible to care about. Apart from Amanda and her manly husband, Bob (who Crittenden describes as "a mighty tree"), every caricature -- excuse me, character -- in the book is either coldhearted, a buffoon or both.
There are the teachers at a hoity-toity D.C. kindergarten who bust Amanda's son for waving a peanut butter cookie "like a loaded gun" under another kid's nose. (Liberals won't let boys be boys, and they're childhood-allergy hysterics, too!) Amanda's beautiful best friend, Susie, is a self-involved witch who guarantees her own doom by pursuing a great job instead of a great man. Amanda's mother, Ellie Burnside Bright, is a shrill, divorced feminist who forced her daughter -- this is not a joke -- to dress up as Billie Jean King on Halloween. This politically correct harpy, who would rather spend her visits to D.C. traipsing through galleries than playing with her grandchildren, hangs up on Amanda when she announces she's getting married at 26, but not before blurting: "Where is the little girl who marched around the bedroom chanting songs about women's power?" While Amanda never addresses the subject of her politics directly, we're clearly supposed to believe that growing up with a feminazi mom led her to become what Crittenden dubbed, outside of fictional camouflage, a "New Traditionalist."
"Amanda Bright@home" reads like a fantasy concocted by the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal (which serialized the book): All of the "liberals" in the book either start off as good guys but quickly turn bad, or see the error of their do-gooder, permissive, countercultural ways. The midwife Amanda visits during her third pregnancy almost kills her and her unborn child by missing obvious signs of dangerous toxemia. Bob, in Crittenden's ripped-from-the-headlines plot, is a government lawyer who gets his big break when he's assigned to spearhead an antitrust case against Megabyte, "the largest computer software company on earth," founded by -- guess who? -- an eccentric billionaire who dresses like a lumberjack and lives in Washington state. By the end of the book, however, Bob has seen the pro-business light, and he's comparing Megabyte CEO Mike Frith to "every other entrepreneur with problems with the government." Indeed, when Frith offers him a job, he jumps, eager to provide for his family like a "mighty tree" should. Crittenden can't resist providing us with Bob's new salary -- $400,000 a year! -- which reminded me of the way she felt compelled to send a mass e-mail last year proudly announcing that her actual husband, then Bush speechwriter David Frum, had coined the term "axis of evil." (Soon after, Frum left the White House; some Beltway insiders blamed his wife's loose lips for his departure.)
Most ridiculous of all is Crittenden's portrayal of the book's stay-at-home dad, Alan. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the level of scorn she heaped on this poor sap. In a 1999 newspaper essay, here's how Crittenden described the "new dads" she observed at an indoor playground on a weekday: "They bore their little charges with great patience, their lilting voices unnaturally high ... I found myself trying to imagine these same men wearing green metal combat helmets, their faces streaked with mud, marching under the weight of guns and ammo packs, instead of diaper bags and baby carriers. No, not possible. So then I tried to imbue them with the quiet dignity and fortitude of men of a generation ago who were shot up into space or who held down dangerous and exhausting jobs in factories and mines to support their wives and children." Nope, stay-at-home dads don't have those kinds of noble jobs, either -- they're all left-wing graphic designers or organic-food purveyors. Whatever they are, they've been emasculated by feminism and their own weenie-ness. And real red-blooded American chicks don't dig pansies.
