Too Clever…

… by half. Isn’t that the expression?

Here is an intelligent –and lengthy– analysis of Dreams from My Father. It places Barack Obama’s book within the rich tradition of African-American memoir, citing names like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Richard Wright. After all the academic stuff, the author makes some attempt to measure out his praise. But it kinda glops out of the cup on him.

The quality that most distinguishes Obama’s writing is its clarity. It sparkles like sugar crystals. His writing feels balanced and just. Although not meticulously systematic, it proceeds with the lucidity that characterizes a legal mind. His thinking is marked by a bright, positive, and outward-looking unselfconsciousness. Dreams from My Father lacks the penetrative depths of Souls of Black Folk, or the Dostoyevskian complexities of Black Boy and Invisible Man. The writer is guided less by logic, finally, than by vision.

Oh, yeah, the vision thing. And don’t forget those sugar crystals. And all that lucidity that characterizes the legal mind. (Sorry, I can’t help thinking of Joe Biden here.)

Anyway. Me (along with Jack Cashill and Andrew McCarthy), I might want to ask a couple of real simple-minded questions.

1. What parts of Dreams are true and what parts are not?

2. How much help did Obama get in putting all that sparkle into his prose?

It’s probably legitimate, in discussing Obama’s first book, to invoke the canon of African-American autobiography (might want to leave out Alex Haley though, what with his plagiarism problems and all).

We still kinda need to keep the basics in mind, don’t we? Or is this conspiratorial thinking? Sometimes I can’t figure out where that starts and ends.

Speed Reading and Writing

This is positively stuffed with important info.

I, myself, am  guilty as heck of signing stuff I haven’t read. All those waivers at the doctor’s office, etc. Be nice to think that our national leaders, such as they are, were doing a little better.

Meanwhile, Jack Cashill continues his quixotic investigation of Obama’s literary super powers. Latest installment here. Jonah Goldberg, who I read and admire, labels Cashill’s case “a bridge too far.” Given what we know about memoirs these days and the sorry state of publishing ethics, I’m not sure I fully understand his discomfort. 

Anyway, Cashill keeps comin’, keeps bringin’ it. An eyewit, in this political climate, will be hard to come by. But never say never. That’s what I say. Some fool plumber may have seen something.

True-ish

I don’t know when we’ll stop getting articles about half-fabricated memoirs. Maybe when we stop getting half-fabricated memoirs. Anyway here’s yet another. This, from James “Million Little Pieces” Frey, caught my eye:

“Look at Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope,” Frey says. “There is small stuff made up there, things altered and characters composited. Would you ask him if it is all true? The question is the intention behind it. Is that honest?”

It’s easy to get things wrong. Like, for a sec there, I thought he said “characters composted.” One of my rare green moments.

And Frey, he doesn’t seem to have the right book; he probably means Dreams from My Father.

But his intentions are good.

Mine too. Really.

Gall or Stones

It seems to be without precedent for a sitting President. And we ain’t talkin’ about The Tonight Show.  We’re talkin’ about this.

Mr. Obama approved the $500,000 advance on Jan. 15. The advance is against royalties under a deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. The project calls for an abridged version of his book “Dreams From My Father” for middle-school-aged children, according to the disclosure.

However, it’s hardly without precedent if something like this (from Jack Cashill) is true.

The thesis is simple enough: Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama’s muse in the creation of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and nothing since, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.

“I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase,” said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of the Dreams’ author. “I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.” Agreed, it was not normal at all.

For simplicity’s sake, I refer to the author of Dreams as “Obama.” He provided the basic narrative and surely had the final say. Not content to merely edit, however, the highly skilled Ayers appears to have woven the rough strands of Obama’s life with tales from Homer’s Odyssey and to have spun a work of literature in the process.

Lots of politicians, of course, have gotten help with their books. However, usually they admit it somehow, maybe even on the front cover. True, John Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, a book he didn’t write. Nobody’s ever come completely clean on that one, though the truth is generally known.

But Kennedy never made the kind of money talked about here. $8,605,429?!!  Most of it derived from a book –one that Cashill calls perhaps the most consequential memoir of our time— that  may have been written with a bunch of uncredited help?

And which is now going to be peddled to middle-schoolers?

Either Cashill is dead wrong.

Or he’s even half-right. And Obama has a lot of gall.

Or some very big stones.

Mrs. Stagger’s Concern

All these. Now this. Mrs. Stagger worries that Marley is next.