Rodham

By Curtis Sittenfeld, 2020, Random House, 417 pages
Reviewed by Janet Cleaveland, Aug. 14, 2020

What if?

That’s the premise of Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel “Rodham,” the story of Hillary Rodham’s path to the presidency if she had dumped Bill Clinton and gotten the hell out of Arkansas instead of marrying him. “What if” is a question worth asking, but the answer, according to Sittenfeld’s narrative, didn’t always sit right with me.

“Rodham” is fiction, and I had to keep reminding myself of that as the author drew on actual events from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s life. The novel opens with the pivotal, gutsy and shining moment when as the student speaker at her 1969 Wellesley graduation young Rodham went rogue from prepared remarks. Her speech followed Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke’s address in which he had not “explicitly mentioned recent protests or assassinations, civil rights or Vietnam,” Rodham concluded. … “I knew I needed to start [my speech] with a rebuttal, a generational rebuttal, to the senator’s evasiveness.”

The “Rodham” narrative next shifts to Yale Law School, her relationship with Bill Clinton and her stint at the University of Arkansas Law School when she was his girlfriend.

I thought I was in for a treat. Sittenfeld is a prolific writer whose work includes the well-received “American Wife,” published in 2008, with a thinly disguised Laura Bush as the main character.

Let me destroy any suspense about my opinion: I detested the book with its piled on, sophomoric, obligatory sex scenes. I’ll spare you details of Bill’s technique and her response. But then the first third of the novel is Bill Clinton’s story, too, and we all know about his extracurricular activities. While I laughed at the idea of a naked Bill Clinton playing the sax for Rodham, other sex scenes seemed overdone, poorly conceived and, frankly, unnecessary.

Hillary Rodham’s gut eventually tells her that Bill is a “serial sexual predator,” and she bails, heading out of Arkansas for Chicago.

“The margin between staying and leaving was so thin, really, it could have gone either way,” Rodham tells herself.

Scroll forward to her life as a brilliant, accomplished woman who becomes a law professor at Northwestern University and a senator from Illinois. Bill turns into a Silicon Valley billionaire with two failed marriages. He practices yoga, takes up gourmet cooking and is a vegan. Score one for karma.

But score one for Rodham, prompted by Clinton crushing her anticipation of sex during a 2005 dinner invitation at his Nob Hill penthouse in San Francisco.

“For anything physical to happen between us,” Clinton tells her after recounting his latest heart’s desire, “that’s just not where I am.” Minutes later, he plays the “old friends” card.

She walks out furious, but breaks free from their complicated past, which could have interfered with her 2016 run for president, including his unsuccessful presidential primary bid against her. That rejection gives her strength, resolve and eventually, the Oval Office.

Halfway through “Rodham,” I thought about putting it aside. Besides the sex scenes, I was disappointed that there was no settling into the presidency, no decision or process that would have been a validation for voters and a strong beginning for the newly elected president. The wrap-up was more of “oh, by the way, Rodham won the 2016 election.” Ho hum. I have a similar beef about her all-too-convenient, perfect boyfriend in the last 20 pages.

But I realized that Sittenfeld’s “what if” question was worth consideration. It made me think of the larger, looming question: What if Hillary Rodham Clinton were president now, duly elected in 2016?

We know what things are like because she didn’t win. What would America look like, and be like, if she had?