and in fact I had the idea for a Hillary story not long after “Danny” was published, yet this story balked at being written and didn’t reach fruition for some years. I just couldn’t get a handle on Hillary as a character, a difficulty I seem to have shared with a great many Americans. Are we talking about Lady Macbeth here, a grasping materialist, a sincere do-gooder, or simply a woman greedy for power? Maybe we’re simply talking about a politician, a species of being whose primary modus operandi is not to give away the game one is playing and one’s deep longing for that game’s ultimate overriding goal, namely power, to the citizenry at large. When these masters of game-playing, deception, sincere-sounding insincerity, and hypocrisy are complex enough in their personalities, depicting them convincingly, rather than only caricaturing them, poses a formidable task. Hillary Clinton is, to her credit, endlessly interesting. In the age of reality TV and a public appetite for gossip that seems to increase by the day, the least we can expect of our rulers is that they provide us with plenty of entertainment.
