Rodham

I felt a bit iffy about Curtis Sittenfeld's Rodham, as I always feel about novels that take real people as their protagonists, especially people who are still alive. (Actually I even felt a bit iffy about Geraldine Brooks using Mr March from Little Women -- though I don't have any reservations about Percival Everett's James from Huckleberry Finn, so I am not consistent at all.)

Having said that, my friend Bridget recommended it and I trust her judgement, and as usual, she was right. I really enjoyed Rodham, which is narrated by Hillary herself and interweaves real events and people with invented ones. It pivots on a crisis in Bill and Hillary's relationship, where Hillary admits she could have just as easily stayed with him or left. In real life, she stayed; in the novel, she goes, and her life from then on takes a very different trajectory. She becomes a law professor, then a senator, and runs for president several times. She continues to cross paths with Bill and also, amusingly, with Donald Trump. Sittenfeld's channelling of Trump's voice results in some of the novel's most hilarious moments (whoops, pun unintended). 

I wonder if Hillary Clinton has read this book; I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be able to bring herself to do so, and I'm equally sure that there were plenty of people in her life who were eager to read it and report back to her. She has no need to worry. This is a highly sympathetic portrait of what might have been, though Sittenfeld probably underestimates the level of hostile sexism and prejudice that Hillary would have faced, even in a fantasy alternate universe.