Amy Bloom’s novel imagines a romance between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok. This relationship has been hinted at by a non-fiction book by Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, published in 2016. Most of the interest of the book is in whether it could be true, but that wears thin after a bit. Bloom makes Hickok the narrator, and she is the more interesting of the two main characters, coming from a poor family out west, and now living on Long Island as an old woman looking back on her life. Her own story is dramatic, and the book would be better with more of it. Roosevelt is a more familiar figure and we see some of the life between her and Franklin, but the focus is more on the romance with Lorena, which lasts many years. We see the changes in Eleanor’s life through the changes in her husband’s life, and some of her public work, but Bloom does not succeed in giving her much character of her own. In the end, the book doesn’t illuminate much except some of the attitudes towards infidelity and homosexuality, which are largely accepted but are kept quiet.

© 2018 Christian Perring

Christian Perring teaches in NYC.