Rodham: a novel
by Curtis Sittenfeld (Doubleday, £16.99)
Felix M. Larkin
Towards the end of this novel (which will make an ideal summer ‘beach read’, if only on Playa de Backgarden), one of the characters speaks about “the sense most of us have that there are other lives out there we could have led”. This novel suggests another life for Hillary Clinton, one in which she doesn’t marry Bill.
They meet and fall in love in the novel exactly as happened in fact in the early 1970s. He is the love of her life, but his compulsive womanising causes her to walk out on him. She becomes, in this parallel universe, a law professor in her home town of Chicago – and in 1992 is elected to the US Senate for the state of Illinois. She remains single.
Affair
Bill, meanwhile, does marry – twice. He becomes governor of Arkansas and runs for the US presidency in 1992. His campaign, however, im-plodes when it is revealed that he has had a 12-year affair with a cabaret singer while still married to his first wife. The first President Bush is, accordingly, re-elected in 1992.
Hillary – now Senator Rodham – seeks the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2004, in 2008 and again in 2016. Her main opponent for the nomination in 2016 is Bill Clinton, who has managed to resurrect his political career after 24 successful years in the tech business in California. Which of them wins, and does the winner then become president? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point”
This is an accomplished novel, a convincing counterfactual narrative – albeit with some silly twists in the plot. Historians are always wary of the counterfactual, the ‘what if?’ questions. Nevertheless, we need to be reminded of the contingencies that have shaped the past.
As the American hist-orian, David McCullough, the biographer of John Adams and Harry Truman, has stated: “Nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can.”
We thus misunderstand history if we assume that what actually happened was inevitable or pre-ordained. When the fictional Hillary Rodham recalls her election to the Senate in 1992, she says that “my decision to run for Senate took on a retroactive sheen of inevitability…the fulfilment of a destiny”, but she acknowledges that things could have turned out differently – and, of course, they did in the real world.
The counterfactual narrative in this novel is clearly premised on the proposition that Hillary would, in the real world, have had a much more successful political career if she had not married Bill.
This is, in my opinion, improbable. She owed her actual election to the Senate in 2000 and her subsequent appointment as Secretary of State largely to the fact of having been Bill Clinton’s wife. It was the payback for – famously – ‘standing by her man’ despite his transgressions.
Entitlement
Her lack of empathy made her an unlikely politician, and her air of entitlement to high political office served to alienate her from an electorate that had been charmed by her husband.
Would another Democrat – say, Joe Biden – have defeated Donald Trump in 2016? I think so, but this is just further counterfactual speculation. By the end of the year we will know how such notions work out in the ‘real world’.