Book of the week: O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous

(Simon & Schuster, 353 pages, $25.99)

“Well, now we know why the author of this much-gossiped-about book wanted to remain anonymous,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. O is a serious disappointment, a “trite, implausible, and decidedly unfunny” speculative account of the upcoming 2012 presidential election campaign that no self-respecting journalist or author could possibly want to take credit for. Aggressively marketed as a Primary Colors for the Obama era, the book has none of the “panache or satiric wit” of the fictionalized portrait of Bill and Hillary Clinton that journalist Joe Klein published anonymously in 1996. The characters based on real-life figures are all “clumsily drawn caricatures.” Even the president himself is a “snarkily drawn cartoon”—an above-it-all intellectual whose narcissism rivals that of the Kardashians.

Actually, Obama seems to get mostly sympathetic treatment here, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. It’s the fickle electorate that frustrates the author, who manages at least to describe the inner workings of a national campaign “with documentary accuracy.” O’s actual protagonist is a fictional campaign manager who’s tapped to head the president’s re-election bid. His efforts “clearly illustrate, season by season, just how effectively presidential campaigners plan, draft, and articulate the political discourse that the press pretends it controls.” But O’s author is too earnest even to have cast a Sarah Palin type as the Republicans’ 2012 flag bearer (a Tea Party darling referred to as “the Barracuda” ducks out inexplicably early on.) The incumbent’s opponent is instead a GOP operative’s dream mix of war hero and business savant, determined, like the president, to run a civil race. “Wake me when it’s over.”

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What a missed opportunity, said Beth Fouhy in the Associated Press. Many readers hunger to know Obama better and would welcome a portrait that shows us more than the “gifted but detached figure he’s been since his debut on the national stage.” This stand-in offers no surprises. He “smokes, rolls his eyes at cable punditry, and puzzles at the way his efforts to rescue the economy have been misunderstood by voters.” Spending time with him might only be worthwhile for “political junkies who can’t wait for the next campaign to start.” For those who can wait, the real thing is bound to be more interesting.