“Here’s the thing,” says one of
Hillary’s more likeable apparatchiks, “We can spend years pondering why
American voters can be dipshits or we can take advantage of it.” I won’t tell you what the particular
dipshittery is here at the end of Curtis Sittenfeld’s hip and witty
counterfactual novel Rodham,
except that it is brilliantly hip and witty.
It is not really possible to play “spoiler” to a narrative already
preemptively spoiled by fifty years of actual history; but authorial ingenuity
always commands respect. Here’s the
thing. I don’t read many contemporary
novels. I know I must be missing a lot
of really good stuff, but the finitude of one’s reading life demands the
application of some rational principle of selection. If there is still a buzz about a book twenty or,
better yet, two hundred years after its publication, I feel more confident
about investing my rapidly diminishing time in it. But I just had a birthday, and my spouse gave
me a copy of Rodham, and I have been
reading it with pleasure and admiration.
In giving me a copy of this
particular book, Joan had her reasons. She
knows that I have a certain semi- or pseudo-connection both with the writer and
with her subject—the imaginary lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not that I know Curtis Sittenfeld even through
her earlier books, let alone in person, but it so happens that I knew both her
father and her brother when they were at Princeton. Both of them, in addition to being memorable
students, went on to become splendid community-minded movers and shakers, and I
am inclined to suppose that the entire family is notable for talent and
achievement. I do have a personal
connection with the Clintons. I am among
their most intimate five hundred thousand friends. President Clinton and I are both Rhodes
Scholars from Arkansas, though not contemporaries at Oxford, the president
being just ten years younger than I. I
was once their guest at the gubernatorial residence in Little Rock, and from
that experience I have a couple of minor Clinton anecdotes. They cannot live up to the ones the whole world
knows about, let alone the frequently X-rated ones imagined by Curtis
Sittenfeld, but they are not without their instructive or amusing aspects. The anecdotes, however, are stolidly factual
and thus fall outside the remit of the day, which is the counterfactual.
Very early in the Trump
administration, perhaps even on its opening day as I recall, Sean Spicer, the
White House Press Secretary, started a huge brouhaha with several confidently
announced statements, including the claim that the crowd gathered on the
Washington Mall on the occasion in Mr. Trump’s swearing in on January 20, 2017,
was the largest in American history, period. Photographs taken at the swearing in of
President Obama in 2009, which were readily available for purposes of
comparison, seemed to many in the sighted community to cast doubt upon the
accuracy of this assertion. Very soon
thereafter Kellyanne Conway, the presidential porte-parole, while locked in
argument with the journalist Chuck Todd on the news program “Meet the Press,”
explained that Spicer’s characterization of the crowd size was not an untruth
but an “alternative fact”—alternative, that is, to the fact that the Obama
crowd was manifestly larger.
I do wish that there were more
serious students of literature in the corridors of the state—and here I refer
to the state in its shallow no less than in its deep forms. Kellyanne Conway has not to this day escaped
the derision brought down upon her by alternative facts. The pettifoggers of Foggy Bottom cannot be
expected to appreciate so elegant a concept.
Perhaps she should have used the more common literary critical term exemplary fiction--that is, a story the
moral truth of which is not constrained by prosaic and vastly over-rated
reality. I have spent a lifetime reading
such works.
All fiction, after all, might be
considered as constructs of alternative facts, not simply because it is not
“true” but because it has to choose among alternative untruths. Tess of the d’Urbervilles might after all
alternatively been Tom of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure could even
more easily been Judy. But how about
Hillary Rodham? Certainly, she is a real person? Would she still be Hillary Rodham if she had
dumped Bill, if she had indeed become President Rodham? Read Sittenfeld’s book and let me know.
“Counterfactual” or “alternative”
history is hardly a new thing among novelists.
(According to some historians I know, it is not a new thing among
historians either.) What if John Wilkes
Booth’s pistol had jammed? Is it not
reasonable to assume that we would live in a much more just country today? But on the whole, our American novelists have
preferred pessimistic “counterfactuals” to optimistic ones. They are especially big on imagined fascist
takeovers. I think particularly of
Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here
(1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against
America. (2004), both of which reimagine American political history of the
1930’s. In the first of these a coded
version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, and in the second an enhanced
delineation (as in “enhanced interrogation”) of Charles Lindbergh get their
authoritarian mitts on the levers of American power, with predictable
results. The predictability is a
problem. In my view it finally condemns
two very fine novels to a kind of political conventionality if not triviality.
The masterpiece of the genre in my
opinion, and by any reckoning a truly extraordinary novel, is Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962). Lewis and Roth may make you shudder and
wonder; but Dick will make you think. Dick had the dubious fate of being regarded
as a “science fiction” writer. That is
not wrong, exactly. He wrote many shelf
feet of science fiction, not only out of his life-long interest in it, but
because he could sell it. Most people
probably know about him on account of the movie “Bladerunner”. I probably would never have read him if the
Library of America had not published him.
As the novel begins, the fascist
take-over of America has already taken place.
In fact there are two fascist
take-overs. The victorious Axis Powers of
1947—the German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire--have treated the American
continent rather as Germany and Russia had treated Poland in 1939. The Germans have occupied the eastern seaboard
and the Japanese the Pacific rim. The
ostensibly unoccupied center of the continent (essentially today’s “flyover
country”) is a tenuous “independent” state and buffer between the uneasy
Axis allies. The counterfactuals of
these arrangements are brilliantly inventive, but that’s only the
beginning. The “man in the high castle”
is a writer living in Wyoming, part of the American Vichy or Neutral Zone, and
the author of a counterfactual novel (The
Grasshopper Lies Heavy) in which America defeats Germany and Japan in World
War II. So you have a counterfactual novel in which a
counterfactual counterfactual novel plays a prominent role. Any confusion engendered by the necessary
breathlessness of this summary will vanish when I tell you that Dick was quite
erudite, and that reading his book requires at least superficial knowledge of
the nature and uses of the ancient Chinese I
Ching, or Book of Changes. Indeed, “Book of Changes” would be a pretty
fair subtitle for any counterfactual novel like Sittenfeld’s or Dick’s. In its weirdness, furthermore, the I Ching is perfect for brief daily
readings in time of plague.
Bambuseaephagy, or the alimentary
consumption of bamboo: a brief report
My last post concluded with the intention of eating some steamed bamboo
tips gathered from my back yard. That
happened, and I yet live. The good
friend who (appropriately distanced) shared my mess declared it to be “about as
tasty as a water chestnut”—a judgment that redeemed with its candor what it
lacked in enthusiasm. I later consulted
a couple of Malaysian internet videos and discovered the superior mode of
dressing and cooking the bamboo. It
should be seriously boiled for quite
a while in some kind of yucky rice-water.
A second lunch thus prepared—though in New Jersey tap-water, our
indigenous yuck--was crunchier and
sweeter, and from the tactile point of view closer to crisp asparagus or parsnip.
As for taste, kind of like a water
chestnut; but it’s got to be absolutely loaded with vitamins.
