Amy Bloom's White Houses

Right out of the gate I'll tell you that I have very  mixed feelings about Amy Bloom's latest novel - I reiterate, it is a novel - about the journalist Lorena Hickok and her long relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. "White Houses" is another in a very popular genre that I call "fictional biography," a genre that began ten years ago with Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank," but which I now believe has been done to death. 

Bloom's novel is beautifully written and is based upon serious research at the FDR library at Hyde Park in New York state and also the highly regarded three volume biography of Eleanor by Blanche Wiesen Cook. But there's something disconcertingly disingenuous about putting fictional words in real peoples' mouths that bothers me as a reader.

That said, I think that Bloom does real justice to the figure of Lorena Hickok, a woman who grew up in extreme poverty, yet worked her way up to become a well-regarded journalist and newspaper woman who was covering then Governor Franklin Roosevelt as he launched his first presidential run. In so doing, she met and fell deeply in love with the refined, shy Eleanor. Ostensibly they were as different as two people could possibly be and yet they drew from each other's strengths.

It's no secret that Franklin was a ladies' man extraordinaire both before and after he was stricken with polio and that his infidelity was very painful for Eleanor. Still, she was his eyes and ears, his conscience and confidant and I believe that they, too, deeply loved one another. What a conundrum. Still, after Franklin's election, Hick, as Lorena was known, became a permanent fixture at the White House, living there for months or even years at a time. She had to give up her hard-won career in journalism as her objectivity was now clouded by her proximity to the first couple, and she always felt that she was there on sufferance.

Bloom deftly addresses the infuriating hypocrisy, still present today, of the double standard for sexual behavior between men and women. Eleanor and Hick's relationship made the president vulnerable to blackmail and undue influence, yet his own dalliances with other women were accepted and condoned. And then there were the "kids" and their disapproval which strained the women's bond as well. How terribly difficult it is to be your true self when under public scrutiny! But Eleanor and Hick endured.

For readers who love all things Eleanor, this novel will be a must read I'm sure. I've no doubt that book groups will devour it.  Me? I prefer the real thing and, though it will be time consuming, I'll dip into the definitive Cook biography for true reading pleasure