If you can trust the word of a publisher in promotion-mode, then Living History is making money: Simon & Schuster reported on Tuesday, June 10, that 200,000 Americans had celebrated the first two days of publication of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir by paying $28 and taking it home. Here at The Observer (which Senator Clinton calls a "limited-circulation publication" on page 346), we asked some American novelists—John Updike, Erica Jong, David Gates, Vince Passaro, Jennifer Egan, Louis Begley, Francine Prose and the contemporary romance writer Laura Moore—to assess the book: the already classic telling of the scene in which the...