Last night, when I informed one of my editors that I planned to serialize my review of O, the novel, on this blog, I got an emailed response that read, “I think this sounds great. A serialized review, in the tradition of the great serialized (and sometimes anonymous!) nineteenth-century novels.” I replied, “Ha. Like saying a Jello mold follows in the great architectural tradition of Iktinos.” So herewith, the next installment of my still-hardening gelatinous review.
I am on chapter 13, a bit less than half way through the book, and I feel I have to give the book a bit more due than I did on Wednesday. The problem is not so much the book itself, it is the publisher, Simon & Schuster, and its shoot-the-moon marketing strategy which peddles this piece of fiction with a fiction. At least so far, this is not a book about Barack Obama, or O, as the narrator likes to say. When Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, he was putting forward a clear theory of Bill Clinton, as a voracious, carnal beast, who craved inhuman levels of approval and attention from other people, didn’t care about the costs, and yet, still, was somehow tragically likable for being so remarkable. So far in O, there is no theory of Obama. He is presented much as his press clippings would suggest, smart, able, frustrated, devoted, bland, sneaking the occasional cigarette. But then the failure to attempt to bring us Obama insight is not really a failure for the book. This is a book about campaigns, after all, and the people who populate them. It would have been better titled “Reelect.”
The more I read, the more I have become convinced that the author is someone I have known, if only because there are a limited number of people who can conjure so easily the internal deliberations of a campaign, its theories and dynamics. It’s all dumbed down a bit, made more Hollywood for a pulp audience, but there are clear tones of truth in it, as when a consultant tells O’s new campaign manager:
In campaigns, you don’t need a lot of experience to make the right decision as long as you understand the pathology of voters. They’re schizophrenic. They’re as gullible as they are skeptical. They believe the worst and hope for the best. They don’t trust us. They don’t like us. And they rely on us to make up their minds for them.
All of this is packaged into a tale with only the most superficial similarities to real types, like comic book caricatures: The rumbled, brooding presidential adviser, a would-be David Axelrod with an overwrought semitic name, Avi Samuelson; the shapely, ambitious twenty-something reporter, whip smart and fierce, who works for Politico, er, I mean, The Body Politic; a pitch-perfect, macho Republican opponent with, dare I say, a rugged jawline; the election night phone calls with polling returns to campaigns from top Associated Press reporters; the deep thinking about long term strategy vs. short term tactics. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s also not a bad read, if you are interested in politics in the same way viewers of network police procedurals are interested in crime.
Another note, there is a bunch of sex in the first 100 pages–a prostitute scandal early on, ala the early episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing (or Aaron Sorkin’s own life); an inappropriate senior campaign staff affair with the aforementioned Body Politic reporter; resulting highly eroticized, miserable phone calls between reporter and source. And yet, this is not exactly Skins on MTV or The Story of O, a fact I also raise because of the deceptive marketing mavins at Simon & Schuster, a publishing house that, I am increasingly certain, will never shower me with the big advance should I choose to write a book. (Thanks again, TIME editors, for the assignment.)
That all said: I am half way through, and while distracted by some plodding prose and unwieldy exposition, I do want to keep reading. Which is about as good a thing you can say about a book like this.