Skip to main contentFated to be the other's bookend, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton each now has an autobiography to wedge between them, though these books, Living History and My Life, could also serve as matching bookends in a pinch, at least in appearance. Both books carry close-up portraits of their creators on the cover and spine, while the book backs are a homey scissors-and-paste family album of the ex-president and the junior senator of New York.
Their separate books, though, with the expected exception of similar quotations, scene-settings and heartfelt clichés, serve two very different purposes. Ms. Clinton's Living History reads as an audition for the future--the four or eight years away when she'll become one of the most serious candidates for president. Appropriately for its tombstone heft, Mr. Clinton's My Life is an appeal to history (both lower-case and capital "h"), challenging us to look upon his work and not despair. Ms. Clinton's book breezily works a line of well-wishers in a banquet hall: all smiles and handshakes. Mr. Clinton's tome is the family bore collapsed in his chair before the table scraps of a holiday potluck: memories and teary regrets.
Though it has its share of leaden moments, Living History has a preciseness and humor that gives the book a healthy narrative drive. Ms. Clinton covers her family's background, her early years, life with Bill, and the tumult-afflicted White House period in a brisk 532 pages. Covering the same time period, Mr. Clinton is just beginning his first year as president on page 532 of My Life, which carries on for another 400 pages, demurely stopping at number 957.
For Mr. Clinton, no note, diary jotting or grocery list of plans is too trivial for inclusion. This minutiae-clogged account begins to drain the life out of the reader even before we get to the "naughty bits," though there we are mercifully spared the cataloging of humdrum perversions involving the intern, the bespooged dress and the cheroot. Still, it is as if Mr. Clinton realizes that his eight years in Washington were an evanescent spectacle--a period in which dreaded History will no doubt find that "some good" was not quite good enough.
Toward the finish line of this cri de career, Mr. Clinton drags the exhausted reader on one last look at the Oval Office before clearing out for the current lout's move-in. He espies a rock brought back from the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969: "Whenever arguments in the Oval Office heated up beyond reason, I would interrupt and say, 'You see that rock? It's 3.6 billion years old. We're all just passing through.'" Would that his editor had had the rock to wield.
In closing Living History, the reader, having followed the arc of Hillary's life, from pro-Goldwater girl to radicalized Wellesley student to U.S. senator, is left with the firm belief that the book's protagonist is capable of even greater things in the future. In lowering the lid on My Life, a reader is more likely to think, "Thank god that's over."
By Hillary Rodham Clinton(Scribner, 532 pages, $16)
My LifeBy Bill Clinton(Knopf, 957 pages, $35)
WWeek 2015