"In Rodham, Bill Clinton marries another, more conventionally feminine woman and becomes governor of Arkansas."

"When a cabaret singer... exposes the longtime affair she’s had with him, Clinton and his wife agree to an interview on 60 Minutes. In our world, Hillary’s forceful participation in that interview saved Bill’s career; in Sittenfeld’s novel, his girlier wife crumbles on the air, and so do his political prospects. Sittenfeld’s Bill Clinton decamps to Silicon Valley, where he becomes a tech mogul, the glad-handing face of a web services company, and very, very rich. Then he gets interested in politics again.... Hillary Rodham never marries, becomes a law professor, then a senator, then the first female candidate to run for president on a major party ticket in 2016. In the absence of a Clinton candidacy, George H.W. Bush is elected to a second term in 1992, followed by a one-term Jerry Brown presidency and two terms of John McCain. Several major historical events, most notably 9/11 and the Iraq war, never occur, leaving Sittenfeld’s Hillary untainted by a Senate vote supporting the latter. She dirties her hands a bit—running against Carol Moseley Braun in a Senate primary and accepting the endorsement of Donald Trump—but the character Sittenfeld makes of this alternate Hillary remains essentially static: cautious, mildly humorous, committed to public service, but no firebrand. Above all, she is diligent, a grind. The weakness of Rodham is this lack of any significant transformation. Unlike Alice Blackwell, [the Laura Bush character in Sittenfeld's American Wife], Hillary Rodham doesn’t come to the gradual realization that she has thrown away her life on a man she can no longer respect and whose values she doesn’t share. Sittenfeld’s Hillary eventually grasps how perilous her passion for Bill Clinton was, but that’s a revelation without much of a price... Alice Blackwell has humbler dreams than Hillary Rodham....  Sittenfeld’s Hillary... is an admirable woman, but a bit boring, her interior life free of the kind of conflicts that make for a fascinating heroine... [The real-life Hillary is] a survivor of conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine.... How could we hope to truly know such a person, or more to the point, how can we go on kidding ourselves that this is her fault?"

From "Curtis Sittenfeld’s New Book Imagines if Hillary Never Married Bill/Rodham isn’t as satisfying as her novel about Laura Bush, but together, they’re both richer" (Slate).

The answer to that question — "How could we hope to truly know such a person?" — should be: by reading a 400-page novel published by Random House that purports to explore precisely this topic. Characters in novels tend to go through "conditions most of us could not endure or even really imagine," and it's up to the novelist to make the character comprehensible and excitingly interesting. The question isn't whether it's Hillary Clinton's fault that we don't know what she's really like inside, but whether it's the author's fault that there isn't a compelling imagined inner life.

Here's the book, in case you want to read it. I was interested in it because someone I respect recommended it. The publication date is May 19th, so I assume this person had an advance copy. I hope. It's awful when authors promote each other's book based on their friendship or their interest in mutual promotion. The author's allegiance should be to the reader.

AND: Does this book rely on the premise that Hillary Clinton married Bill Clinton simply out of "passion"? I've always thought she figured that the partnership was a good bet in the achievement of her worldly ambitions. It's so soppy not to give her that.

ALSO: I'm reading "Hillary Never Married Bill/A new novel hypothesizes a different history — and future — for a trailblazing woman" by Frank Bruni (NYT), who interviews the author:

I mentioned her fixation on first ladies and asked whether there might be Michelle Obama and Melania Trump novels to come. No, she said, suggesting that Michelle’s 2018 memoir, “Becoming,” was so openhearted and definitive that it didn’t leave much room for a novelist.

And Melania? Sittenfeld declined to say much about the current first lady to me, but she previously told The Guardian that she didn’t “see her as someone whose consciousness I yearn to explore.”...

So what does Sittenfeld "yearn to explore"? The next thing in this piece is:

There are whole facets of public figures’ humanity — of the Clintons’ humanity — that we don’t have access to and can’t explore... Indulging in guesswork, [Sittenfeld] visited interiors and rummaged around in intimacies that are otherwise off limits.

“Falling in love and kissing another person — that’s what you read novels for, and that’s what you write novels for,” she said. “I certainly read a lot of nonfiction and respect it, but even the most personal profile of a public figure is not going to have almost anything about them kissing or feeling attracted to someone or maybe having sex and feeling awkward.”

And the piece began with the line "Curtis Sittenfeld likes to imagine the sex lives of presidents." I'm going to say Sittenfeld doesn't want to live vicariously within the persona of Michelle Obama or Melania Trump because she's not turned on by imagining having sex with either Barack Obama or (especially) Donald Trump.