Readers and viewers may be tiring of familiar dystopian fictions, especially since they have blurred into reality. These new works replace them with hopeful fantasies, solidly rooted in the real world. It is a coincidence of timing they are landing in the midst of a global pandemic, but these counterfactual stories are potent reminders of how different today might have been.
Until now, alternate histories have most often been cautionary tales about a bleak, authoritarian future, with World War Two a flashpoint. In HBO’s The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh is the fascist president of the US. In the Amazon series Hunters, Al Pacino’s character leads Jewish Americans as they track down resurgent Nazis in the 1970s. And Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle posits that Germany and Japan won the war. These series function as warnings about our own political dangers.
But 2016 sparked a different dynamic, perhaps because a non-Brexit world and a President Hillary Clinton were such near-misses, the results so shocking. It may be a stretch to imagine that the Nazis triumphed, but we had already imagined a Brexit defeat and a Clinton victory, bringing these alternate histories close to home.
Sittenfeld’s novel is the most daring, as it takes us inside a fictional Hillary’s mind and uses a first-person voice. Getting inside a living person’s head sounds like a colossally bad idea, but Sittenfeld makes it convincing here, just as she did with a character based on First Lady Laura Bush in her 2008 novel, American Wife. The first stretch of Rodham rarely diverges from Clinton’s life, while creating a psychologically astute portrait that seems as authentic and revealing as any non-fiction biography. Fiction gives us an intimacy that a factual portrait couldn’t, though. When Hillary and Bill meet as idealistic students at Yale Law School, we feel their genuine mutual attraction, sexually and intellectually, in what the fictional Hillary calls a “swoony” romance. Bill is not the most faithful or honest guy around, but we understand why she follows him to start a life together in Arkansas, where his political career begins.
