'Rodham' Review: Hillary Unbound
A book by By Curtis Sittenfeld
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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.
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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.”
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/rodham-review-hillary-unbound-11589842789 (subscription)