Amanda.Bright@home
by Danielle Crittenden
Wall Street Journal

Amanda Bright has two small children, a small house in Washington and a husband who works long hours at the Department of Justice. She's secretly envious of her friends' country-club suburban lifestyles but feels compelled to stick to the vestiges of a bohemian aesthetic. Amanda is trapped — in a shockingly bad serialized Danielle Crittenden online novel.

"Amanda.Bright@home" is the latest project of The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. Set to appear in weekly installments between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it's been heavily hyped by the WSJ. "Fast-paced and witty, 'Amanda.Bright@home' is a vivid account of modern politics — and modern sexual politics — by an author with an inside view on both," runs a WSJ press release sent to Jim Romenesko's Media News. Serialized e-fiction by a noted antifeminist pundit — it's a daring move for the sometimes-stodgy Journal. If the first two installments are any indication, it's bound for Internet-speed oblivion.

You can deduce from the title that there's probably someone involved named Amanda Bright. She's at home. The "@" signifies the breakneck speed of modern life, and maybe something to do with computers. Right, right, right and right. Need we go further?

Crittenden does. From the first installment, we learn that Amanda and her husband Bob could have moved to a ticky-tacky suburban subdivision but chose their "typical Cleveland Park row house" for its very dissimilarity to a tract house. She worked for the NEA three years ago but left to take care of their children. She clings to the clutter and secondhand furnishings in her house as evidence that she's just biding her time as a stay-at-home mom, not becoming a full-fledged homemaker. Bob is involved in a high-profile DOJ case against the "Megabyte" software corporation — watch for "Gil Bates," perhaps, to make an appearance in future installments.

But there's a dissatisfaction lurking below the surface. Well, actually, on the surface. In the first sentence, in fact. There's a problem with Amanda's one-foot-out-the-door stay-at-home life. Crittenden drops a few clues that something may be amiss. Amanda is unhappy in her small house after spending time at her friend Christine's spacious home. She is unhappy that her children leave their toys where she can trip on them. She is unhappy with her weight. She is unhappy with the news that Bob may be taking a more prominent role in the Justice investigation, leaving her to tend the kids alone. This isn't the problem with no name, it's the problem with no boundary conditions.

And Crittenden, as only a pundit can, also drops a few equally subtle clues as to the source of Amanda's dissatisfaction. First of all, she did work for the NEA; this could all be cosmic payback for that Mapplethorpe thing. She's PC to the max, correcting her 3-year-old for saying "Indian" instead of "Native American." Her "egalitarian" worldview doesn't allow her to contemplate her husband's ease at getting the kids to behave, or even his "manly and authoritative" appearance in a business suit.

One thing Crittenden gets spot-on is her cultural anthropology, bringing to mind a novelist version of David Brooks (whom I already tend to confuse with her husband, Bush speechwriter David Frum.) The kids' names are Ben and Emily; a less sharp observer might have called them something like Jared and Brittany. Amanda wears loose batik-print pants and a white t-shirt, a virtual uniform for thirtysomething women making a half-hearted stab at an urban hipster look. The inhabitants of Amanda's city neighborhood dine on pad thai and lamb vindaloo.

What she gets wrong is the characters' motivation. Are we really supposed to believe that a woman who so assiduously styles herself as her husband's equal would experience "a guilty rush" at the idea of mentioning to him that she'd had a glass or two of white wine at a friend's house, as Amanda does, or agonize over how to "justify" to him that she doesn't have dinner ready on time?

Crittenden's novella thus far reminds one of nothing so much as Candace Bushnell. In "Four Blondes," the follow-up to "Sex and the City," Bushnell writes about a character named Winnie, a journalist who manages both to be a humorless feminist and to look down on single, glamorous fortysomething women like a certain New York Observer sex columnist and novelist. For her part, Amanda looks down on "New Traditionalist" housewives like a certain Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist and e-novelist.

So if you're wondering where this is all going, look no further than Crittenden's column in the Independent Women's Forum newsletter: "It's easy to ridicule us New Traditionalists, just as it was easy to sneer at the Babbitts of the 1920s or the Harriet Nelsons of the 1950s. Domestic life — particularly bourgeois, home-owning, child-rearing, domestic life — must always appear stultifying and unaesthetic to those who imagine themselves living sophisticated, modern lives. Then, of course, these same critics get married and have babies. Suddenly they find themselves walking up and down the appliance aisles at Sears, two screaming children in tow." Instead of two screaming children, it's a thinly drawn character who doesn't seem to have much say in the matter.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)