The Aviator's Wife

Having enjoyed Melanie Benjamin's previous books (Alice I Have Been and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, which seems never to have made it into the blog, but which I remember liking), I have been looking forward to reading her most recent novel, The Aviator's Wife. Benjamin's third book is in the same vein as her previous two - historical figures reimagined and revisited. In this case, the character is Anne Lindbergh, aka Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, himself known by any number of nicknames, not least "Lucky Lindy" after his successful solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

Character voice - the extent to which Benjamin is able to embody Anne Lindbergh and make the reader forget that The Aviator's Wife is a fictional account - is the real strength of this book. The weakness is the characters themselves. Anne and Charles both become, very quickly, people it is hard to like (although the reader can at least feel sorry for Anne who is so hunted by the early paparazzi that one cannot help but compare her to Princess Di - or Kate Middleton). Both Anne and Charles are complex characters, but Charles is portrayed here, accurately or not, as a domineering bully, pompous and bombastic on the best of days; cruel and sneering on the worst. Also he seems to have been an anti-Semitic Nazi-sympathizer, which doesn't really help him much. As for Anne, although I was frequently irritated by Anne's seeming indecision and weakness, I also recognize that it is difficult (at best) to judge a woman who lived in such a different era, when opportunities and expectations were so very different from today.

As with The Paris Wife (the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, and still the best of the historical fiction character embodiment novels that I've read), it's hard to know where the facts end and the fiction begins. Benjamin includes a few pages of notes at the end where she sites specific incidents that are true - such as the kidnapping of their firstborn - for example, as well as incidents she created for the purposes of her story. Still, I was left scratching my head over her decision that Anne would never reveal Charles's womanizing to their children; this information is clearly in the public domain today, so it's not clear if the real Anne ever felt this way or if Benjamin made that decision for her own reasons.