She knows she is plain, she knows she is overweight, and she has been told more than once that she is no one’s ideal lover, but she is good at doing the best she can with the materials at hand. Hick is perennially aware of her good luck in escaping her childhood circumstances, and also in attracting Eleanor’s love and occasional passion. Although she has been steadfast in her love of him, he practically ignores her and it falls to Hick to maintain what contact remains between the White House and Missy’s family. One of the most poignant characters in White Houses is FDR’S assistant, Missy LeHand, who has a stroke early in the novel, when she is only 44 years old. I wouldn’t have been able to stand how easily she would tell me one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday, without a blush.” I would have known that I was married to a charming liar. About halfway through the novel, Hick observes, “If Eleanor had been Franklin, I would have worried about infidelity. I never knew this, nor did I expect him to be so ruthless.
The real shocker, at least for me, is Bloom’s portrayal of FDR, who is shown as a serial womaniser. The implication is that her humanitarianism arises from not only her generous nature, but also her sense of her own circumscribed life.īloom gives Hick a plausible and compelling voice as the reader’s own inside reporter, letting us know what life in the White House felt like. Eleanor, from a wealthy and sheltered background, is attracted to Hick’s tales. There she met Gerry, “Brother and Sister in One Body”, who may be truly intersex and may be faking it, and who notices that Hick is more attracted to his female side. Hick is a compelling narrator she tells the reader a few things that she doesn’t tell Eleanor, including that her sexual awakening came when she was working for a travelling circus. She is also deeply in love with Eleanor Roosevelt, who reciprocates her love when she can, though she is beset by many distractions, including her unpleasant children, her faithless husband and her predilection for always doing the moral and generous thing. Hickok, known as “Hick”, is a smart, self-made newspaper reporter raised by a cruel and sexually abusive father in Nebraska. What she finds there is rank corruption and plenty of paradoxes, some of which resonate with the world we live in now and some of which do not.īloom’s novel is short, but dense and affecting. A my Bloom’s new novel uses the power of gossip to get inside the Roosevelt White House through the character of Lorena Hickok, real-life aide and close companion to Eleanor Roosevelt.
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