Where would Hillary be without Bill Clinton ?
Que serait l’Amérique si Hillary ne s’était pas mariée ?
Aux États-Unis, le couple Clinton a souvent fait l’objet des suspicions les plus fantasques, certains suggérant même que leur mariage n’est autre qu’une alliance politique. Dans son nouveau roman, Rodham, une biographie fictive et pour le moins politique, Curtis Sittenfield répond à une question brûlante : quel aurait été le destin d’Hillary si elle ne s’était jamais mariée à Bill Clinton ?
Love is the great accident. We can fall for the wrong person, or we can have the great good fortune to attach ourselves to the right person, and the strange thing is, we may never know which is which. In Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2008 novel American Wife, a woman’s tough love pulls her husband back from alcoholism and then he becomes president of the United States. That woman is a fictional version of Laura Bush and she sometimes wonders at the amazing, almost casual particularity of her role in history. Sittenfeld’s new book, Rodham, undoes destiny, and it tilts toward the political rather than the intimate. This is, in part, because its heroine, Hillary Clinton, is a greater political force than Laura Bush ever was. But also, in Rodham, there is no central marriage. That is the whole point.
2. In the old days, people used to think Hillary was hitching a ride on Bill’s career – now it is possible to think that he held a good woman back. Rodham is an account of what might have happened if she had taken one hard look at Bill’s promiscuous nature and run out of the relationship. It is a very exciting conceit; the only pity is that Hillary’s life feels more dull as a result.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
3. The first third of the novel is one we know from the history books. The couple meet at Yale, move to San Francisco and then to Fayetteville, where Bill plans to run for office, in Arkansas. In this version, however, Hillary quickly discovers the nature of the man who is the love of her life, and she decides to leave him. “It was unfathomable that we were hugging a final time, that I was climbing into the car, starting the engine,” she says: and then she does just that.
4. We find the new fictional Hillary in 1991, working as a law professor in Chicago, single and happy enough. Bill has become governor of Arkansas, as he planned to do. At his side is a sweet, soft-spoken, younger wife who wears Little House on the Prairie dresses and cries when challenged on television about his infidelity. This is a version of the famous 60 Minutes interview, in which the real Hillary saved Bill’s presidential campaign. When alternate Hillary watches it from her life in Chicago, she thinks her ex-boyfriend’s wife is weak. “Bill needed an equal who acted like, even if he’d had affairs, so what?”
5. The game of the speculative part of the book is to consider what might have happened differently and what would have happened anyway, and this is a lot of fun. What is the result of happenstance and what of choice? Some incidents look familiar: the suicide of a colleague, the rise of Obama, the fact of Trump. Sittenfeld teases apart the strands of fate and weaves them together in a slightly altered pattern, but she does not change the personality of the actors, nor can she change society itself. Misogyny is a constant in this fictional Hillary’s life, too, though the men who incite it are crucially different. All through her journey, the book holds a certain dream
intact – that, without Bill, our heroine might have become her proper self.
HILLARY AND BILL
6. Bill Clinton attracted women with great ease and frequency, but though the word “charisma” is much used, it is hard to tell what exactly his secret was. Perhaps he was addicted, not to women, but to the pleasures of deceit – and these pleasures sometimes require being found out. So it is possible to see why Clinton needed a woman like Hillary to cheat on, over and again, and less easy to see what she got out of being punished in this way, apart perhaps from the moral high ground and, with it, a sense of her own superiority. The battle for power was in their marriage long before it was in the world. Everyone can have a theory about what happened within the marriage, including people who think it was just a political pact, but one way or the other it was the place where Hillary Rodham Clinton was trapped. Or perhaps too much can be made of a marriage – we might also remember that, in 2016, she won the popular vote.
7. The story of the real Hillary Rodham Clinton may or may not be a great modern tragedy. You can ascribe to her one or other flaw (pride is always a good contender); you can ask did she, or the US, deserve her outrageous and misogynistic fate. But Sittenfeld knows that a novel about defeat is not what liberal America needs right now, because liberal America has already suffered too much sorrow and disbelief. The US desperately needs a fantasy. Rodham is a wonderful, sad dream of what might have been
– it contains so much yearning and so many regrets. It is impossible not to sympathise with the project, while still insisting that the best novels are about difficulty, compromise and moral hazard.
“Without Bill, Hillary might have become her proper self.”