‘Rodham’ gives alternative history of Hillary and Bill

Curtis Sittenfeld likes to imagine the sex lives of presidents.

She did it in “American Wife,” a best seller whose protagonist, Alice Blackwell, stands in for Laura Bush and falls hard for the character modeled on George W. in part because of his exertions between the sheets.

She does it again in “Rodham,” her new novel, to be published May 19.

The fascination of the first third of “Rodham” is its weave of history and hypothesis as it chronicles the initial meeting of Bill and Hillary at Yale Law School, their courtship and her migration to Arkansas when he makes an unsuccessful run for Congress. Embellished details are grafted onto established events.

The fascination of the rest of “Rodham” is its whole-cloth divergence from the record. Sittenfeld’s novel asks: What if Hillary and Bill hadn’t married? What if her professional arc had been entirely her own?

It’s an ingenious conceit, because it gets to the central paradox of reallife Hillary, the initial reason she became such a mesmerizing, polarizing, meta-cultural Rorschach. She’s a feminist trailblazer who first arrived at stratospheric celebrity because of her husband and was perceived and analyzed largely in terms of her relationship with him. She’s a voice for equal opportunity who kept biting her tongue. Bill indisputably lifted her up; he unequivocally dragged her down.

In Sittenfeld’s novel, she and Bill break up around the time the actual couple got engaged. They’ll intersect anew, but I’d be spoiling “Rodham” to explain how, why and with what result. I’d be encroaching on reviewers’ turf to say whether I found the story believable.

What would Hillary have done about today’s pandemic? “I think it’s hard for that thought not to cross one’s mind,” Sittenfeld told me in a recent interview. “When you look at charts showing how many deaths there have been per capita in the U.S. versus other countries, and it’s the same pandemic everywhere, it does seem there are circumstances or decisions or leadership that affect it.”

I’ll be less decorous. Hillary obviously would have managed this pandemic better, because Trump could hardly have managed it worse.

The difference between “American Wife” and “Rodham” — both narrated by their heroines — stems from Hillary’s inscrutability.

So Sittenfeld had to will herself into Hillary’s perspective.

For decades I’ve listened to Hillary’s detractors opine that if she hadn’t hitched her wagon to Bill’s, she wouldn’t have traveled so far. But the reverse could be truer. At one point in the book, a woman who works with Hillary tells her, “It’s weird you almost married Bill Clinton because he seems so unworthy of you.”

I asked Sittenfeld if, after playing with the notion that Hillary went her own way, she’s surprised that the real Hillary said, “I do.”

“No!” Sittenfeld responded. “Actually, the opposite.” Noting that as part of her research, she read the first quarter of Bill’s 1,000-page autobiography, “My Life,” which covers everything up until the Clintons’ marriage, she said: “I felt myself falling in love with Bill Clinton . ... I believe they were attracted to each other.”

There are whole facets of public figures’ humanity — of the Clintons’ humanity — that we don’t have access to and can’t explore. But a novelist can, so Sittenfeld did. Indulging in guesswork, she rummaged around in intimacies that are otherwise off limits.