President Obama’s self-mocking comment—”My ears are too big for Mount Rushmore.”—is what first came to my mind when I saw the clean and sharp cover of O: A Presidential Novel (anonymous author). What caught my attention are the ears. Ears—we all have them. But chances are that your ears aren’t nearly as famous, or as widely discussed, as those of President Barack Obama. Let just say his ears are as big as Sarah Palin’s mouth. The book has been sitting on new book shelf at work and I couldn’t resist it. Politics has never been my priority but a fictionalized rendition of politics never fails to pique me. What little truth that fiction affords might as well be more real than the actual truth. The first impression from reading first pages is that the anonymous author, who claims to be a White House insider, is anti-Huffington Post. The plot, which imagines the events of the upcoming 2012 election, offers little that’s unexpected. Some of the characters are so obvious—David Axelrod, Arianna Huffington—that Anonymous could just as well have used their names. The novel rides on a mundane plot with characters are composites: the Republican candidate seems to be Mitt Romney, had Mitt Romney ever been a general in the army. O is very light reading, which I mean to be a warning to readers: it’s as though the author wrote an outline of the plot.
Filed under: American Literature, Books, Literature Tagged: | American Literature, Books, Literature, O
The funny part about this is that when I saw this at B&N last week, the ears made me think about GW rather than O, even with the O in the center.
I flipped through and thought it may be “lite” so I passed.
‘outline of a plot?’ sometimes isn’t fiction more real than what we think is reality? Something to think about. Politics, not my realm but I love to talk about it.
Perhaps it would have been a better read had it been about presidential ears. I wonder if the author is “anonymous” to make people think he/she is some sort of insider. Sounds like they just didn’t want their real name associated with this drivel.
I was hoping it was going to more in the vein of Primary Colors which I loved. It’s a shame that the author couldn’t do a better job.
By the way I think Sarah Palin’s mouth is bigger than anyones ears.
I was excited by the idea of this one but have heard from numerous sources, now including you, that this just isn’t that great. I’ll probably skip it all together or wait until I can check it out from my library and skim it without guilt.