If I Had Read This During the Election

I would have been insufferable.

So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:

It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).

This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.

To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.

But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.

So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.

By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.

It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.

I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.