"Rodham": What Might Have Been
On Curtis Sittenfeld's novel reimagines Hillary Clinton, the 2016 election, and the nature of fact in fiction.
Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld (2020)
On its surface, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham is a novel that asks, “What if Hillary hadn’t married Bill Clinton?” Beneath that surface, the book is really asking questions about the nature of reading – what is fiction, how do we read it, what do we do with reality and the baggage it forces us to bring to novels? As such, reading Rodham is an exercise in keeping two sets of books: the literary purist in me wants to read it the way its disclaimer advises (“Rodham should be read as a work of fiction, not biography or history”); but as a citizen of a nation unduly influenced by its younger sibling overseas, I can’t overlook the topspin given to the facts by Sittenfeld’s what-iffery.
This readerly double-vision is inevitable given that – true to Tennyson’s self-assessment and true, no doubt, to the real Hillary – Rodham contains multitudes. It isn’t one thing and is frequently several things at once. The legalistic disclaimer on its copyright page is certain of itself: “Rodham is a work of fiction.” The book’s central conceit – how the 2016 election might have shaken out had Hillary never married Bill – is pure fantasy. But while the novel might not actually be biography or history, it does contain both, and in its smarter pages, reality and fantasy interact like chemicals in an experiment to see what happens when fact X is alchemised by fiction Y.
The featured Sliding Doors moment in Rodham happens when a young Hillary overcomes (just barely) her idolatrous zeal for Bill to reject his offer of marriage. From here, we are through the warped looking-glass, in which things look familiar yet misshapen. A 60 Minutes special that, in reality, saw Bill and Hillary denying an affair on Bill’s part here features Bill and a fictitious wife. Later, an ill-advised comment about choosing a career over staying home and baking cookies comes, in Sittenfeld’s reimagining, during Hillary’s first presidential campaign, but it will echo in the reader’s mind as having come, in reality, a decade earlier during Bill’s run for the presidency.
These synchronicities between reality and Sittenfeld’s fiction imply other resonances: Hillary’s comment disparaging housewives is presented as poor phrasing that the media outrage-machine displays in the worst possible light; no doubt, a reader might surmise, the same was true when Hillary actually said it back in the nineties. This principle might even extend to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment. That line doesn’t appear in the novel, superficially because Trump doesn’t run in the 2016 presidential race, but many other real events and comments are worked into alternative scenarios. I can’t help but wonder if its omission is due to how difficult it would be to downplay it, as Sittenfeld does Hillary’s other “gaffes”. (Even in context, it’s not a great line, and it’s followed by a sentence – “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” – that is remarkably similar to the very sentence that got Trump in so much trouble at the beginning of his candidacy – “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”)
The omission is telling, as is the soft rewrite of Hillary’s treatment of women who accused Bill of extramarital affairs, sexual assault, and rape. Take the case of Gennifer Flowers: when Hillary was Bill’s first lady (enjoying with it power, prestige, and the platform from which to look down on Flowers), she described Flowers as “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t have much of a resume to fall back on”. Hardly a stirring manifestation of girl power, which is probably why the line never appears in Rodham. But Sittenfeld’s Hillary does have something to say about Flowers, when someone else refers to her as a call girl. “She’s a cabaret singer, not a call girl,” Hillary says self-righteously.
When it comes to the more serious accusations of rape, in Rodham, Hillary’s great sin is one of omission – she simply fails to believe the accuser and keeps the allegation to herself. Late in the novel, it seems this might come to something interesting when Bill opposes her for the Democratic nomination. The rape allegation could be leveraged against him, which raises two moral quandaries for Hillary. First, the ethics of utilising an allegation of rape as a political lever; second, the difficult questions it asks of Hillary’s passive role in the situation: why did she keep it to herself, why did she not believe the woman, and if she did believe her, why did Hillary say and do nothing for decades? Sadly, this storyline quietly fizzles out. The hard questions are never asked.
This makes it difficult to defend the novel against the charge that it is fan fiction, a novelistic universe in which wrongs against Sittenfeld’s idol are righted. The character assassination (or character suicide) Hillary suffered in 2016 is deflected in the novel, which simultaneously defends her from criticism and absolves her of guilt. In fairness, while reading the middle section of Rodham, I did detect an incisive critique beneath the adulatory surface. When Hillary runs for senate against Carol Moseley Braun, a black woman, we see through the veneer of her post hoc reasoning about how Braun is unlikely to win and better Hillary take it from her than a Republican. And when Hillary tries to convince her friend Gwen, another black woman, that it isn’t about race, Gwen’s devastating response is, “Well, sure ... This isn’t about race for you.” Sittenfeld allows the blow to land without commentary.
But where is this kind of clear-eyed critique when it comes to Hillary’s other shortcomings? The worst thing that can be said of Sittenfeld’s Hillary is that she is boringly naive and remarkably unremarkable; given her education, life experience, and reading, I can’t account for how unfurnished her mental life is. Her view of the world is simplistic enough that any decision can be made according to her “Rule of Two” (“If I was unsure of a course of action but could think of two reasons for it, I’d do it.”) In Sittenfeld’s rendering, Hillary remains emotionally undeveloped even into old age, thinking of Bill in the same obsessive, boring-to-an-outsider way that a teenager develops a crush. Ultimately, Sittenfeld’s Hillary is far less multifaceted than the novel itself.
I think it’s fair, given the experiment Rodham is conducting, to consider alternate versions of this novel – and there is a version in which the wrinkles of complexity are explored rather than smoothed out. We occasionally do see something like this in Rodham, as in Sittenfeld’s sensitive treatment of childlessness. On this topic, Sittenfeld resists sentimentality and cynicism about the trade-offs between career and parenthood, leaving room for the reader to consider how full or empty that glass is. Sadly, such nuance rarely extends to Hillary herself. Our imagined alternative novel could be one in which Hillary is much more unreliable as a narrator. Her naivety might be written such that its sincerity is called into question, and her plainness might be suggestive of duplicitousness. This Hillary could be allowed some personal failings larger than falling for the wrong man.
In fact, this alternative version exists, in Sittenfeld’s 2008 American Wife, an account of Laura Bush’s marriage to George W Bush. That novel is a successful portrait of a complex person, because the main character’s interiority is the author’s primary interest. In Rodham, Sittenfeld seems more concerned with escapism – from the result of the 2016 election, from the reality that the best candidate in the next election will be merely a lesser evil, from the fact that Clinton gave as much of the election away as Trump took from her. This is why, however you read Rodham, it’s hard not to think about what it might have been, if only it had been something more than wish fulfilment.