Book Review: O: A Presidential Novel

Published on Thursday 27 January 2011 14:11

O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL Anonymous Simon & Schuster, £12.99

WELL, now we know why the author of this much gossiped about, heavily marketed new book wanted to remain anonymous: O: A Presidential Novel is a thoroughly lackadaisical performance - trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny.

Although the novel's publisher has borrowed the marketing strategy of Primary Colours (whose author was later revealed to be journalist Joe Klein), O has none of that book's panache or satiric wit.

The novel - set during the 2012 presidential campaign - wants us to think we're learning something about the real-life White House and the real-life mediasphere. But the characters who are meant to sound familiar - including a news-aggregating website's founder, who speaks in "heavily accented English", and a rumpled White House adviser, charged with "protecting the president's brand" - are clumsily drawn caricatures. The title character turns out to be a snarkily drawn cartoon too: a conceited narcissist whose inner life consists of gripes about his opponents, frustration with his job, daydreams about golf and self-congratulatory pats on his own back, combined with put-downs of the country at large.

O complains that the Tea Party is a mob of "conspiracy nuts, immigrant haters, vengeful Old Testament types, publicity hustlers, and people who just have way too much time on their hands". And he believes "his gift as a public speaker was greater and rarer than the one commonly attributed to him, his ability to inspire people".

This president is described as fantasising, in very bad romance novel prose, about running against a Sarah Palin-like character referred to as "the Barracuda": "There she was, baby on her hip, thick hair piled up high, chin out, defiant, taunting, flaunting that whole lusty librarian thing, sweet and savoury, mother and predator, alluring and dangerous."

O's hypocrisy and arrogance, along with improbable plot developments, make it hard not to suspect that the author of this novel is a Republican sympathiser - or at the very least someone very disillusioned with Obama. (At the time of going to press this person was widely being identified as Mark Salter, a former aide of Obama's opponent, John McCain.]

On the book flap the writer is described as someone who "has been in the room with Barack Obama". Well he must have been a lousy observer and the room must have been the size of a convention centre.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 30, 2011