Did We Really Need a Hillary Clinton Novel? (The Answer Is No)

Hillary Clinton, patron saint of overachievers, has a new sideline: writing thrillers. Her first effort, State of Terror, is coauthored with best-selling mystery writer Louise Penny. The novel is the kind of book you’d buy in the airport to read on a plane, except, while I haven’t been in that situation in a while, my recollection is that even airports sell better books than this.

It’s possible to write good thrillers with bad politics. During the Cold War, most novels in the genre had the kind of anti-communist conservative politics we at Jacobin would consider “bad,” but some of them were still fun beach reads. (Although the best thrillers to date are those in the Millennium series [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] by the late Stieg Larsson, a Swedish Trotskyite feminist journalist who once trained women guerrilla fighters in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.) Clinton and Penny’s novel is not of this ilk. The problem is, State of Terror is not thrilling, for the same reason that the Clintonite Democrats are not exciting the electorate right now: they’re too obsessed with Donald Trump and the Right.

There are some spoilers in the review that follows. This doesn’t matter because — and I can’t emphasize this enough — you don’t need to read this book.

State of Terror revolves around two main characters: Ellen Adams, US Secretary of State in a Democratic administration, whose inner life is rendered somewhat charmingly (during high-level global security meetings, she fantasizes about having a glass of chardonnay with her Canadian counterpart, also a woman), and Betsy Jameson, Ellen’s best friend, who is modeled on Hillary Clinton’s real-life best friend, Betsy Ebeling, who died in 2019. The plot revolves around a global crisis: amid multiple terrorist attacks, a Pakistani arms dealer and terrorist threatens America and the world with nuclear bombs. Eventually, it turns out he’s not working for Iran or al-Qaeda. Instead, he’s teamed up with forces within the American far right who have infiltrated the deep state and even the White House. The novel ends with disaster — a nuclear attack and right-wing domestic coup — narrowly averted.

The novel implies that the far right threatens civilization and democracy more than al-Qaeda does; that’s probably correct, and a sound message. But the novel’s plot is ridiculous. The real danger the far right poses isn’t through any relationship to shadowy terrorists, nor infiltration of the security state or the Democratic White House. The danger is in the Right’s skill at gaining power by undermining ordinary democratic processes — by eroding voting rights, for example — and by using our existing antidemocratic structures, like the Electoral College. What’s also dangerous about the far right is its global appeal to ordinary people (a problem that is, to the…