To build a political base in his adopted city, Obama had to write a book, but it's a measure of his seemingly unbounded confidence in his abilities that he set his sights on making the book a work of literary art. "Dreams" is less memoir than novel: Most of its characters are composites with fictional names; its total-recall dialogue is as much imagined as remembered; its time sequences are intricately shuffled. It has an old-fashioned plot, as it charts the progress of its hero, first met as a 21-year-old loner for whom "my solitude" was "the safest place I knew," on a Ulyssean quest for identity and community. Like a Trollope novel, "Dreams" ends with a wedding scene, in which all the warring fragments of Obama's life -- black and white, Hawaii and Indonesia, Kenya and Chicago -- finally cohere into one like pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Married to a South Side native, and, by inference, to the South Side itself, the wandering hero has at last come home, in -- as it so happens -- the very heart of [Illinois representative] Bobby Rush's political bailiwick.It’s tempting for Barack Obama’s critics to dismiss his memoir as the expanded product of a college creative writing course.
Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in "Dreams," the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.
But the book really takes wing when Obama wriggles out of the constraints of the first person singular and, like a novelist, imagines his way into the skulls of other people. Early on, he tries to see Kansas in the 1930s through the young eyes of his white grandparents, "Toot" and "Gramps," when they were courting. Later, his 7-year-old self is playing with Lolo, his Indonesian stepfather, in the backyard of their house in a Jakarta suburb when Obama catches sight of his mother, watching them from behind a window. For the next five pages, he leaps inside her head to observe himself and Lolo through her eyes. It's a bravado performance, as the writer feels on his own pulse the pain of his mother's expatriation and her budding estrangement from her new husband, so troublingly different in his native Indonesia from the student with whom she fell in love in Honolulu.
[Digression: In the past decade there’s been too much tearing down of good and talented individuals in the furtherance of political ends. Speaking as one who is for the most part on the right side of the aisle, I can understand the urge to repay the criticisms and calumnies that have been heaped upon conservatives (did you forget so soon the condescension and mocking regard of the Governor of Alaska, the comparisons of the current President and Vice President to the worst mass murderers in history, the gleeful recitation of one side’s sexual misconduct and corruption and deathly silence about the other side, at least until after the election), but as I tell my children, you are better than that.]
“Dreams from my Father” is light reading, but it’s not lightweight. It can be read quickly as narrative, but also has layers of complexity---should one look for them—that cause it to rise to the level of art. To write well requires thinking, dedication (because of the world’s distractions), and introspection. That’s what’s amazing about our next President. He rose to the top of the rough-and-tumble world of politics, while
the solitary existence of the writer, recasting the world alone in a room, generally unfits him for the intensely sociable, collegial life of practical politics.I still harbor many doubts, but there’s a chance that Barack Obama may just be the new man foretold half a century ago. He continues to surprise and amaze, and who knows..... © 2009 Stephen Yuen
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