Friday, June 19, 2020

Curtis Sittenfeld's "Rodham" (2020)


I received Rodham for my birthday. This book is vintage Curtis Sittenfeld: fun to read, it raises questions that are provocative but not too deep or serious.

The premise is straightforward. Hillary Rodham meets Bill Clinton while they are both at Yale Law School, but he cheats on her (while Hillary is interning at a law firm in San Francisco) and she decides not to marry him.

After a stint as a professor at Northwestern, she becomes a Senator in 1992 -- defeating Carol Mosley Braun in the Democratic primary, which earns her the enmity of her until-then mentor, an African American woman modeled on Marian Wright Edelman.

I like the way that Sittenfeld imagines Hillary's psychology. She is ambitious but altruistic; practical without completely sacrificing her ideals. She's definitely not perfect, but she's considerably more likable than my-conception of "the real Hillary." Here's an excerpt:
"I had thought that I'd like being a senator; in fact, I loved it. The first speech I ever gave on the Senate floor was about fair housing, and the first bill I ever co-sponsored was the Improving America's Schools Act of 1993, and I loved being able to tangibly and directly take on the problems I had spent my adult life thinking about ... My sense of purpose as a senator made me recognize retroactively that there had been a certain slackness in my life before, or perhaps it was that previously I had been imposing structure on my days and now an external structure was imposed on them. I felt busy in a good way."
In a twist, Bill -- having become a tech billionaire after dropping out of the 1992 Presidential race when he and his wife mishandled allegations of infidelity -- challenges Hillary for the 2016 nomination. Bill is not likable at all. Sittenfeld's explororation of Bill's character flaws is causing me to feel even sadder/more frustrated about his personal and political shortcomings.