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Discuss this article by @SpanishSpy here
But, if Sittenfeld had done that, would as many people have read it?
I honestly think this is the best review you've written, @SpanishSpy . Critical but also evenhanded.
Certainly worthwhile to consider about what the quality of prose you could be aiming for is regardless of anything else.
Yeah, "the writing part of the writing is very good" should be a thing most writers try for!
The lack of policy, and Sittenham's quoted "yeah so?" about it, do strike me as weird and worth criticising in a book about a politician. If you're going to argue This Would Be Better, we surely have to see how, it can't just be personality based. (Obviously a lot of readers disagreed but I disagree with them so checkmate!)
One thing that has always struck me: it's a book about two people still alive and married, saying "wouldn't it have been better if they weren't?"
That feels a bit Wrong in a way most AH politician stuff doesn't.
Alex's review is balanced, fair and insightful but I must admit I also really like the review from the jewish chronicle by Andrea Long Chu he linked to which just rips the book and the author to shreds.
A superb review, @SpanishSpy. A review that makes me both want to read it still (as it's been on TBR list for a bit now, as we talked about elsewhere) and makes me think I'm going to be a tad frustrated with it when I do.
The more AH I read and indeed write, the more right I think you are about writers falling into the temptation of trinketization. Indeed, reading the review, I can't help but wonder if this would have worked better as a Roman a clef like what George Bernau did with JFK and the mid-sixties in Promises To Keep (which I'll be reading in the near future). But, if Sittenfeld had done that, would as many people have read it?
I wouldn't call it dull - Sittenfeld's big strengths are her prose and how she develops Hillary as a character. Those two kept me going - that, and a curiosity as to how she'd actually pull it off.I'm not sure I have anything to say other than it sounds like one hell of a boring book.
I wouldn't call it dull - Sittenfeld's big strengths are her prose and how she develops Hillary as a character. Those two kept me going - that, and a curiosity as to how she'd actually pull it off.
It is a phenomenally odd experience to read Hillary Rodham as a fawning law student and Bill Clinton as Casanova in a romance that can get rather steamy, and physically detailed to boot.
if a book about Theresa May opened with her fussing over a dog and going "oosa good boy OOSA GOOD BOY" or something.
I think that in real life, if she had not married Bill Clinton, I'm not sure she would have led the life that I create for her in the novel. And I think with a novel like this, you know that the reader is bringing some opinions or expectations.
While I don't regret the $1.25 I spent or reading the novel by any means (and I've already picked up a copy of the novel for another writing pal of mine), I'm still frustrated with the novel. Especially having read American Wife not that long ago and seeing the superb job that Sittenfeld did taking another First Lady's life and building a novel out of the bones of it, I would love to take a sidestep into the universe where she took a more Roman a clef approach to this idea. One where she might not have been weighed down so much by the baggage of expectation. Indeed, having read the novel a bit in conjunction with an idea of my own, the debate about approach might be worth writing an essay of my own on the expectations of (sub)genre and subject matter.