This country was built by men and women who believed in service, community, and working together for the greater good – pioneers who stuck together in wagon trains, farmers who pitched in on barn raisings and quilting bees, immigrants who joined volunteer fire departments, enslaved people who risked their lives to serve on the Underground Railroad and help others escape to freedom.

Quite where the railroad barons, oilmen, industrialists, and finance kings – not to mention the Native Americans who were dispossessed by the wagon trains, the immigrants who peopled America’s industrial workforce, World War II Japanese internees, the Pacific islanders forcibly removed from their atolls, and the Hispanics who provide America’s domestic help and gardeners – fit into this version of America is left unsaid.

Hillary Rodham Clinton casts her life story in softly glowing terms. There is no reflection on the wider American story and little enough on the things that shaped the narrower story of her own life – the personal distance that so constrained her parents’ relationship, the straitened affective circumstances of her mother’s upbringing or her father’s emotional remoteness. Yet these early life experiences may well go to the heart of her evident reliance on her friends for her own emotional well-being, and her acceptance of the betrayal in her husband’s all-too-public infidelities. Bill might have been a hard dog to keep on the porch, as she is quoted as saying, but she shies away from explaining what greater good led her to let him stay there.

She is clearly an intelligent woman whose focus and doggedness drove her ambition, though it failed to deliver what she most wanted – the presidency. For her admirers and sceptics alike, her book will fuel their doubts, no more so than in how she reflects on her catastrophic presidential campaign in 2016. She is unapologetic for her attack on alienated and angry Americans – ‘the basket of deplorables’– who support Donald Trump. In fact, she compounds the error by confusing them with their prejudices. She writes:

In 2016, I famously described half of Trump supporters as ‘the basket of deplorables’. I was talking about the people who are drawn to Trump’s racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia – you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to January 6 … If anything, ‘deplorable’ is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.

Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2000 (Granger/Alamy)

There is, of course, no place in any civilised society for hate and violent extremism or the other Trump deviancies. Yet for a person as exposed to politics as Clinton has been, to double-down by conflating people with their pathologies is as serious a political mistake as one can make. She has learned nothing.

Clinton makes the trite sound meaningful and the meaningful trite. As she reminds her readers rather too frequently, she enjoyed being the First Lady, living in the Governor’s Mansion, occupying the White House, travelling on Air Force One, and the other trappings of entitlement and power. Can there be a greater assertion of peer-group dominance than inviting one’s friends for a sleepover at the White House? And the twice-mentioned daily New York Times Queen Bee word-game competition with Bill before they get out of bed each morning suggests a new and altogether thrilling dimension to connubial bliss.

Clinton saves her most forceful prose for the tragedy of the Afghanistan evacuation and the abandonment of so many who had supported the United States in its futile war against the Taliban, which the United States had armed when it was the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union. She writes in equally passionate terms about women’s suffrage, abortion rights, gender rights, and the rights of LGBTQ+ communities. She is a strong and committed advocate for equality and inclusion. But the utopian picture of the America of her childhood is in stark contrast with her dystopian view of the post-Trump election world. For this she saves her darkest thoughts, prescient given America’s inability to save itself from itself by re-electing Trump.

Clinton also cements herself into America’s feminist pantheon. Coming from a white, male reviewer even older than she is, this may sound avuncular. Clinton is, however, relentless in her advocacy of women’s participation in all parts of the nation’s social and political economy and women’s pursuit of leadership roles in the major national and global institutions. She has internalised the silence of women worldwide, captured so poignantly in the lines of the Indian school student whom she quotes: ‘Too many women in too many countries / Speak the same language of silence.’ If America is to save itself from itself, women and their voices will play the pivotal role.

For Australian readers, Clinton’s preoccupation with faith and churchgoing may distract from her personal principles, values, and what appears to be innate grace. In a country where structural racism, misogyny, economic inequality, gun violence, drug violence, and domestic violence destroy the lives of so many, religious conformity too often condones turning a blind eye, forgiving the unforgivable and justifying the status quo. With its deeply protestant tradition, the privileged are Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Only two Catholics have made it to the presidency and eight Jews to the Supreme Court. America is distinctly protestant in its culture, mores, and traditions, and Clinton puts all of that on display. Perhaps her dour perseverance in the Methodist faith is the key to her acceptance and forgiveness of her husband’s extramarital adventures. But it would have been good if she had made that clear.

So, what is Clinton like? She is very serious and not much invested in fads, styles, and trends; a swot, a try-hard, a goody-two-shoes perhaps, without any particular sense of drollery or comedic instinct. Something Lost, Something Gained lacks the wordplay and invention that amuse readers, or the humour that reveals a sense of the absurd. God knows, there is much absurdity in American politics. She is a kind of American Theresa May – the naughtiest thing she has ever done is to court environmental catastrophe by shampooing her hair in a lake. Oh, what fun!