Curtis Sittenfeld had immense success in 2008 with her novel, American Wife, a fictionalised retelling of the life of Laura Bush.
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Now comes Rodham, her much anticipated fictional portrayal of Hillary Clinton.
The basic premise of Rodham is "What if Hillary hadn't married Bill?".
Of this, Sittenfeld has said, "my main goal was to examine chance, fate, free will and the notion of parallel universes or other, unlived lives".
- Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Doubleday. $32.99.
Sittenfeld's opening chapters closely follow actual events in Hillary's early life, such as her time at Wellesley College and Yale Law School and her first meeting with the "handsome lion", Bill Clinton.
Their subsequent relationship take the reader into unexpected graphic sexual detail. Bill plays his saxophone naked before sex ensues, leaving Hillary "mindless, when Bill was inside me".
Sittenfeld has said, "I have complicated feelings about the sex I chose to include . . . (but) I feel it makes the story".
Bill and Hillary leave for Arkansas, where Bill plans to run for Governor. Hillary, as a young female law academic, has to confront local misogyny and Bill's "talent for deceit" and serial infidelity. As a result, in 1975, Hillary decides to leave Bill, "a hard dog to keep on the porch".
The narrative then cuts to 1991 with Hillary, an unmarried, lonely law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago. She is persuaded to run for the Senate in 1992, when Bill fails to become President. George H. W. Bush instead wins a second term, Jerry Brown wins in 1996 and then John McCain is President in 2000 and 2004, before Barack Obama wins in 2008.
Hillary struggles against a male-dominated American political scene, especially when she is running for President in 2016 against Bill, a sleazy Silicon Valley billionaire, still with a "compulsive infidelity". Hillary wonders if she will lose her moral compass if she accepts the endorsement of Donald Trump, who is no different a character in Sittenfeld's parallel universe.
Sittenfeld's Hillary often seems more a composite figure, representing the issues women face in politics, than a vibrant central character, while the reader also needs to constantly juxtapose the imagined and the real Hillary Clintons.
Sittenfeld, when asked if her book was a liberal revenge fantasy, replied, "I don't think that the primary objective is political revenge".
While Rodham, at times, seems aligned to the genre of celebrity fan fiction, ultimately it is political fiction taking us to a counterfactual America most readers would prefer to contemporary America.