What Hillary did next (after ditching Bill)

Dominic Cavendish sees political history consigned to the bin in a reimagining of the former first lady’s life

CRODHAM by Curtis Sittenfeld 432pp, Doubleday, £16.99, ebook £8.49

urtis Sittenfeld has done it again: taken a famous American female political figure and spun a lengthy yarn from some of the key facts of her life. American Wife (2008) was a name-making bestseller for the Cincinnati-born author, 44, telling the fictionally recast story of Laura Bush, and accentuating how haunted Dubya’s wife was by a teenage car-crash that killed a close friend.

With Rodham, the focus has shifted to the woman who preceded Bush as first lady, in her capacity as the wife of Bill Clinton. Except that in

Sittenfeld’s radical, liberty-taking rendition of the life and times of Hillary C, the known sequence of events is put in the trash-can. Sittenfeld has been open about her allegiances. “I’m one of those people who can’t bring herself to say ‘If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election…’ because, to me, she did win,” she pronounced in a newspaper article last week. Given this devotion, it’s no great surprise that she puts the heroine of her book in the White House on her own terms and merits, without ever being the consort of the

42nd president.

Key to this revised historymaking outcome, which Sittenfeld arrives at after hundreds of pages and some 130,000 words, is the ejection of the twinkly eyed, sax-playing Arkansan from Hillary Rodham’s life in 1975. As happened for real, the young, thrusting Bill Clinton moves back to his home state after Yale, to teach law at a university (in Fayetteville) and start building a political career, with his partner (also teaching law) willingly subordinating her ambitions. A wedding is on the cards – but instead of the duo tying the knot in October 1975 after several proposals on his side (the first, in the Lake District, nicely evoked here), she here opts against marriage (a marriage Clinton herself described in her 2017 memoir as “the most consequential decision of my life”).

Everything we’re reading, we’ve advised in a blithe disclaimer, is fiction; a similar covering-note accompanied American Wife. But manifest make-believe starts getting the upper-hand over embedded, corroborable actuality at this point. Sittenfeld’s Hillary (let’s call her Hillary v2, or Hv2), recoils from Bill’s infidelities and is left with suspicions about this leonine Lothario after a woman approaches her to claim that she was the victim of sexual assault.

In a scene that could work well in any TV adaptation (the whole thing feels made for TV), Hv2 sobs her eyes out as she drives into Missouri, part-propelled by his warning: “I’ll drag you down. The thing that’s wrong with me is incurable.” She’s blubbing so much she can’t see out of the windscreen, but she doesn’t stop, in case she decides to turn around: “The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.”

The rest, then, is herstory. This re-rendered Rodham becomes even more her own steely woman and gets elected to the US Senate in the early 1990s, while the conjectured Clinton marries a less clever, more conventional sort, only to blow his presidential chances in a Gennifer Flowersesque scandal (the “ideal” wife walks out where in real life Hillary crucially – if cynically? – stood by her man in Bill’s winning 1992 campaign). Things thereafter get curiouser and curiouser.

The years roll by and Rodham enters the 2016 presidential election race, running for the Democratic nomination against Clinton (now a sleazy Silicon Valley billionaire) and getting support from Donald Trump (who was, believe it or not, an admirer at one point). Her Republican rival is Jeb Bush, and the America whose future they’re arguing over is roughly the same as today’s, but not all that tangible. For example, 9/11 happened, but it only gets one mention, deflecting tough considerations about the relationship between White House incumbents and the flow of history.

If Hillary Clinton reads the book, Sittenfeld has said, “she won’t like it”. I’d be amazed if she did. No one

Trump supports Hillary’s election bid, while Bill’s supporters chant ‘Shut her up!’

D-DAY GIRLS by Sarah Rose 400pp, Sphere, £9.99

Following the lives of three women who went behind enemy lines as agents for the Special Operations Executive, carrying out intelligence work ahead of D-Day, this entertaining history sheds light on overlooked figures. Sarah Rose has a pithy turn of phrase, even if her prose occasionally lapses into a Mills & Boon style.