The genre of alternate-history fiction has produced plenty of schlock and a few genuinely good novels: Kingsley Amis’s “The Alteration,” for example, in which the Reformation never took place, or Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” in which FDR loses the 1940 election to fascist-leaning Charles Lindbergh, or (although it has its detractors) Stephen Fry’s “Making History,” which depicts a 20th century without Adolf Hitler. Now Curtis Sittenfeld, author of “Prep” and “American Wife,” has produced another standout in the genre with her readable and psychologically acute new novel, “Rodham.”
What if Hillary Rodham had turned down Bill Clinton’s marriage proposal, embarked on an independent career and left him to get on with things in Arkansas? “Rodham” follows the historical record up until 1975, when, after several years with Bill, Hillary understands that she will never be able to trust him around women; it’s even possible that he raped someone. After much soul-searching she breaks off the relationship and goes home to teach law at Northwestern.
Bill soon marries someone quite different: a sweet elementary-school teacher from Texarkana. This choice helps propel him into the governor’s mansion. But as he launches his 1992 presidential bid the inevitable sex scandal breaks. In real life, of course, he overcame the Gennifer Flowers debacle with Hillary by his side, but in “Rodham” he has a vulnerable wife who weeps during their “60 Minutes” interview. “She was so—there was no other word for it—weak,” Hillary reflects, watching them on TV. “Bill needed an equal who’d act like even if he’d had affairs, so what? Because they both were sophisticated and tough. . . . The American public would not, of course, like such a woman, but that didn’t matter.”
So George H.W. Bush is elected to a second term; he is followed in office by Jerry Brown (one term), John McCain (two terms) and then Barack Obama (two terms). Bill consoles himself by moving to Silicon Valley and making a cool billion or two, shedding wives along the way and morphing into a silver fox. Hillary is elected U.S. Senator from Illinois, a seat she holds for more than two decades while making three bids for the presidency. It is during the third one, in 2016, that Bill resuscitates his political career and runs against Hillary in the primary. It would be a spoiler to reveal the outcome of all this, but Donald Trump does enter the picture—though not quite in the way readers might expect.
Rodham
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 420 pages, $28
Ms. Sittenfeld, born in 1975, is a generation younger than her protagonist but not young enough, thank goodness, to treat the mores of the 1970s and ’80s as grotesquely Neanderthal. As someone who lived through those years and thought she was paying attention, I was startled to realize that in 1991 only two U.S. senators were women, and that as late as the 1970s some Ivy League law schools had a special “Ladies’ Day” on which professors made it a point to call on female students, who were presumed to be too diffident to speak up on any other day of the year.
Ms. Sittenfeld’s Hillary is a product of her time: As an early boomer, she is caught up in the second-wave feminism that flourished in her youth but imbued, through her 1950s childhood and strict Methodist upbringing, with traditional notions about a woman’s place. “You’re awfully opinionated for a girl” is a line she has heard more than once. She agonizes over her crippling ambivalence about her own ambition and worries about her moral worthiness to hold office—not a question that would much bother Bill Clinton, or most male candidates.
Ms. Sittenfeld is at her best in depicting the bizarre freak show into which presidential elections have devolved. There is the “pink tax” demanded of women candidates—extra time they must spend on their appearance. This amounts to a full hour a day for Hillary: “Whenever I didn’t have my hair and makeup professionally done, the media would speculate about whether I was ill or exhausted.” Then there are the obligatory big-donor events and liberal lollapaloozas like the Aspen Ideas Festival (disguised as a Jackson Hole symposium in the novel): “The Grand Tetons rose behind us, a jazz quartet played on a patio near a stream, servers pressed bacon-wrapped dates and tuna tartare, and an unsurpassed quality of progressive schmoozing occurred.”
Most distressing is the amount of coaching and grooming so many candidates undergo in an endless and often fruitless effort to modulate their behavior according to polling numbers. This was particularly evident in the case of the real-life Hillary Clinton, an insecure candidate who was almost too self-controlled. If we’ve learned one thing in recent decades, it is that authenticity is of incalculable importance in presidential elections. Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders: You may not like them, but you can’t deny they’re authentically themselves. With Hillary Clinton one was never sure. But how authentic could she really be, with the press always poised to pounce whenever she put a foot wrong? “Really,” she reflects, “wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do?” Bill, of course, is a natural; Hillary is painfully aware that she is not. “I was a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment. I’d believed instead that every situation was a trade-off, that there was always a catch.”
Ms. Sittenfeld’s one misstep in this hugely enjoyable book was in turning Bill Clinton into a comic-book villain, an amoral user and sexual predator who trades in wives for newer models and would have done the same with Hillary had they married. Caught up in the novel, I was almost surprised to remember that in fact the Clintons are still married 50 years after their first meeting—presumably to their own satisfaction, as there is no longer any political necessity for their union. In this case, the reality—the fact that these two forged a partnership that has endured in spite of everything—is more interesting than Ms. Sittenfeld’s simplistic good feminist/bad sexist dichotomy.
Ms. Allen reviews books for the Journal and other publications.
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