"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…