Joyce Carol Oates reviews Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, American Wife (and also looks at her previous novels), on page one of the New York Times Book Review: “Our greatest 19th-century prose writers from Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville through Henry James and Mark Twain took it for granted that ‘American’ is an identity fraught with ambiguity, as in those allegorical parables by Hawthorne in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ […]