2016 – The Bibliolater

By Curtis Sittenfeld

All Posts Contain Spoilers

I’ve wanted to read ‘Rodham‘ since I learned it existed. I don’t know why I did – it belongs to a category of novels with which I generally have very little patience: the historical novel. I love history, and when I read it, I like knowing whether or not what I’m reading actually happened. Novels obscure that: they present real histories clothed in fiction, and readers (at least this one) can’t always tell the truth.

‘Rodham‘, though, is a little different. It’s an alternative history, a kind of novel for which I have even less patience. The only thing less likely to get you at the truth than a historical novel is a historical novel about a version of history which didn’t actually happen.

But I’ve been curious about ‘Rodham‘ for years. It’s such a ballsy thing to do, to write a novel about a living person, and about Hillary Clinton in particular, who will surely be remembered as one of the most polarizing and complicated political figures of our time.

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton met at Yale Law School (in real life). They dated, and moved to Arkansas together to pursue his political ambitions. The first two times he asked her to marry him, she declined. The third time, she accepted. The premise of ‘Rodham’ is, simply, ‘what if she hadn’t?’

I wonder what Sittenfeld wanted to accomplish here. A description of the premise (‘What if Hillary Clinton had never married Bill Clinton?) promises a different novel than the one I have just finished. I suppose that ‘Rodham‘ was meant to answer a wish of Sittenfeld’s to know what Hillary’s life might have been like if Bill Clinton wasn’t the star of it. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton is also the star of ‘Rodham’, just from a more distant vantage.

Alternative fictions must start from a truthful premise, an anchor, from which they then wander off into speculation. The truth to which ‘Rodham‘ anchors itself is that Bill Clinton is the love of Hillary Clinton’s life. Though she leaves him in ‘Rodham’, because he is (both in our reality and in Sittenfeld’s, a philandering rapist), Hillary loves and misses him until well into her sixties. He is the sun around which her imagination revolves for almost the entirety of her adult life.

Which is kind of a bummer, honestly. I was so curious about this novel because I am interested in this idea: Hillary Clinton, more than almost any woman of political ambition that I can think of, is defined by her marriage. It’s not super heartening to think that, if we didn’t marry the great men we might have married, we might accomplish great things ourselves but we wouldn’t ever really get over them.

It might have been less of a bummer if Sittenfeld had given Hillary Clinton more dimension in fiction than her actual public persona suggests. One of the eternal ‘truths’ about Clinton is that she possesses no emotional warmth, that she is a cold, odd, calculating creature of pure ambition: planning her whole life for political attainment, not equipped with the normal spectrum of human feeling.

Sittenfeld basically accepts this unfortunate premise. Her Hillary is odd, and sort of cold. She accepts cruelty, betrayal, heartbreak, grave personal insult, without a normal human recoil. Sittenfeld doesn’t do a great job in persuading her readers that there are hidden depths to Hillary Rodham, and that’s a shame, because I suspect that there are.

Also, ‘Rodham‘ is a little too cute. Throughout her novel, Sittenfeld sprinkles events that happened in real life, weirdly specific ones. Her reasons for doing this are obvious: she wants us to understand that some things are inevitable, some dynamics and personalities will emerge no matter the path we choose, and fair enough. But I do not believe, for example, that if Hillary and Bill had not married and Bill Clinton had not become President of the United States, that Donald Trump would have ended up making his exact “Hispanics are rapists” speech, word for word, in 2016, albeit in a totally different context. And I do not believe that Bill Clinton’s supporters would end up chanting about Clinton, “Shut her up! Shut her up!”. I see what Sittenfeld is trying to do, but it’s too much, at least for me.

Ultimately, ‘Rodham‘ is, (perhaps inevitably), a novel about sexism. The interaction between Hillary and the public in 2016, the curious clashing of her personality, her history, her gender, and the prejudices and expectations of the public on both sides of the political spectrum, was dismaying and painful to a great many women. I completely understand why Sittenfeld might have felt the need to explore that experience in this way, and, essentially, I agree with her conclusions: it does seem to me that some things are inevitable in any timeline, and it does seem to me that we carry our characters with us, and that they inform our destiny at least as much as our destiny shapes them.

But I do wish, if Curtis Sittenfeld was going to go all out for Hillary, that she had given her a little more: more depth, more heart, and more independence. And, perhaps, that she had made her slightly less virtuous? It is precisely the impression (illusion?) of impervious, unemotional, competent control that so many people find alienating about Clinton (besides, of course, the fact of her having a brain AND a vagina) – might it not have been worth interrogating that a little? Trying to find some more complexity in her?

I don’t know. ‘Rodham‘ disappointed me, but perhaps I am being unfair. It’s hard to judge a book without knowing its purpose – maybe ‘Rodham’ was never intended to seriously illuminate the woman behind the persona, or interrogate feminism, or punish the wicked in fiction. Maybe it was only meant to be a weird little mental exercise. However, I think it could have been a great deal more, and I’m sad it wasn’t.

By George Saunders

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

“”I’ll tell you something else about which I’ve been lately thinking!” he bellowed in a suddenly stentorian voice. “I’ve been thinking about how God the Almighty gave us this beautiful sprawling land as a reward for how wonderful we are. We’re big, we’re energetic, we’re generous, which is reflected in all our myths, which are so very populated with large high-energy folks who give away all they have! If we have a National Virtue, it is that we are generous, if we have a National Defect, it is that we are too generous! Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a small crappy land? I think not! God Almighty gave them that small crappy land for reasons of his own. It is not my place start cross-examining God Almighty, asking why he gave them such a small crappy land, my place is to simply enjoy and protect the big bountiful land God Almighty gave us!”
Suddenly Phil didn’t seem like quite so much of a nobody to the other Outer Hornerites. What kind of nobody was so vehement, and used to many confusing phrases with so much certainty, and was so completely accurate about how wonderful and generous and under-appreciated they were?” (p. 10)

In 2005, George Saunders published a thin little novella called ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘. At the time, I thought its plot was charmingly weird:

The nation of Inner Horner is so small that it can only hold one of the six inhabitants of Inner Horner at a time. While they wait for their turn to occupy their nation, the citizens of Inner Horner occupy the Short Term Residency Zone of Outer Horner, the nation which total surrounds theirs. One day, however, a piece of Inner Horner crumbles, sending the momentary occupant of Inner Horner tumbling across the border into Outer Horner.

Unfortunately for the Inner Hornerites, this incursion is witnessed by Phil, a citizen of Outer Horner. Phil was once madly in love with a citizen of Inner Horner, Carol, and her rejection has made him bitter. Phil uses the sudden toppling of an inner Hornerite into his country to whip his fellow citizens into a nationalistic frenzy. He will co-opt the Outer Horner Militia and use them to terrorize, extort, and eventually disassemble the Inner Hornerites.

When I read ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ for the first time, in 2006 or 2007, I thought it was strange and dismal and funny. I love George Saunders, I love his whole vibe. I love his worldview, his dark, sad humanity. I love his sense of humor. I’ve loved George Saunders since the first short story of his I’ve ever read.

And I loved ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil’, when I read it in 2006 or 2007. I thought it was the best thing he’d ever written.

But I read it again the other day, now, this year, 2016, not 2006 or 2007, and it isn’t funny now.

‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ is about the damage that a sadistic, brittle demagogue can do to a vulnerable population. It’s about how a cowardly population will cow-tow and appease that demagogue as long as he tells them that they are the best people on earth. About how they will overlook and excuse any cruelty towards people that they believe are different from them.

It’s not funny anymore.

This is yet another way that books are like people: you can lose them. Sometimes they turn into jerks as they age; sometimes you just grow apart. Things that you thought were hilarious when you were younger, stop being funny. Things that blew your mind the first time you heard them, turn out to commonplace. That’s pretty normal.

But that isn’t what happened here. ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ didn’t age badly – we didn’t outgrow each other. The world changed between 2006 and 2016: specifically, the line between ‘plausible’ and ‘absurd’ moved dramatically. And so my relationship with fiction premised on the absurd changed as well.

What I realized when I reread it this week is that ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ was only absurd in its details; its emotional message is completely realistic. People are small-minded, provincial, and cruel. We do display a near-total lack of empathy when we are confronted of the suffering of someone we have decided isn’t like us. It is possible to build a cultural movement premised on the degradation of other people. It is possible for that movement to gain traction in your country. It is possible for that movement to take over the government.

I think I assumed that, because some of ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ was fiction, all of it was. That assumption was stupid and totally unwarranted on my part, but nevertheless: I think that I relaxed into the surrealist detail, allowed the weirdness to give me emotional distance.

I understood that ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil’ was a parable, I understood that there was a moral point being made. I just figured, I think, that it was an exaggerated moral point. I assumed it was hyperbolic, satirical.

It isn’t though, not in 2016. It’s a deadly serious moral point wrapped in silliness. It’s not funny.

It makes me sad, either way. There aren’t so many beloved, brilliant, absurdist little parables that I can afford to lose one. It’s sort of awful to have ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘ ruined for me by the changing of the world.

I wonder how Saunders himself feels about ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil’ now. I wonder whether he has startled himself with how prescient he was. I wonder whether he knew he was writing an almost literal prophesy, the future of my country and his.

I bet he isn’t surprised at all.