What would have happened to Hillary if she had never married Bill?

Bill and Hillary Clinton stop at a petrol station. The attendant, it turns out, is a high school boyfriend of Hillary. As they pull away, Bill says, “Just think – if you’d married him, you’d be the wife of a petrol station worker.” Hillary responds: “No, Bill. If I’d married him, he’d be president of the United States.”

In the early ’90s, after Bill Clinton was elected president but before we knew the extent of his unwieldy appetites, that joke was everywhere. Hillary, at the time, was merely an impressive first lady. Her job description was to perform wifehood and, as a result, her intellect was something to be celebrated. Later, especially when she ran for political office, that brilliance became a liability – and her refusal to leave Bill another sign of a conniving personality.

With her fifth novel, Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld returns to the premise of that bygone joke to ask: what would’ve happened to Hillary if she’d never married Bill? Here in the US, Sittenfeld’s has been one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated books. I loved her previous works American Wife (a fictionalised account of Laura Bush’s marriage to George W.) and Prep, her debut about a New England boarding school which remains the most astute statement on class in modern America I’ve encountered.

As Sittenfeld imagines it, Hillary was attracted to Bill first for his striking good looks (“a handsome lion”), then for his ability, unusual in Hillary’s male contemporaries, to appreciate her mind. Later on in Rodham, as in real life, these qualities become dangerous. Bill famously proposed to Hillary three times before she agreed to marry him; in Sittenfeld’s story, they break up after the third proposal and Hillary returns to her home town, Chicago, to begin a highly successful career in law.

Which is precisely the problem with this book: competent, decent, public-spirited people don’t make for compelling protagonists. The minute Bill left the story, I missed him. I wanted to throw my Kindle across the room at times, so enraging was his behaviour but even in fictionalised form, he is a compelling figure.

Hillary, a four-part documentary due to air on SBS later this year, further illustrates this point. Hours of interviews with Hillary show she is never not thoughtful about her extraordinary life, but it’s that measured approach which leaves the viewer frustrated. Asked about the unending sexism she’s faced, Hillary shrugs and says: “You’d get no points for being emotional. You’d get no points for trying to defend yourself. You just put your head down, you worked hard.” Words to live by, sure, but not exactly high drama.

As for her husband, who is also interviewed at length, there’s never not a tear in his eye. (If Hillary was constantly crying, she’d be destroyed for being “over-emotional”.) Of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he is characteristically vivid and infuriating: “You feel like you’re staggering around – you’ve been in a 15-round prizefight that was extended to 30 rounds, and here’s something that’ll take your mind off it for a while … Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments and terrors, fears of whatever, things I did to manage my anxieties for years.”

If that quote about managing your anxieties doesn’t tempt you to throw this magazine across the room, you can probably see my point. In literature, and politics, maybe it really does all come down to charisma. As Sittenfeld puts it in Rodham, Bill Clinton is simply “a person who took up more than his share of oxygen”. And ink, inevitably.

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