Barack Obama’s presidential memoir can be split into two narrative styles. The first chronicles his almost cinematic life story up to his January 2009 inauguration. The rest is devoted to the first two and a half years of his presidency. Though they are in the same memoir they read at times like different books.
Obama’s limpid prose, which shot him to fame in the mid-1990s with his precocious autobiography, Dreams From My Father, is alive and well in the way he describes his pre-presidential days, including his historic 2008 campaign. It is easy to see why Penguin Random House gave him and Michelle Obama a combined $65m — an advance to which none of his predecessors have come close.
Once he reaches the White House, however, Obama’s storytelling arc hits a plateau. Some of the life drains from the writing. Though A Promised Land concludes with the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, his account of that dramatic moment feels almost anticlimactic. It is hard to shake the feeling that Obama preferred the thrill of the journey to the destination. And who can blame him? His ride to the top was a blast. In 2000, almost broke, and at the nadir of his political fortunes as an Illinois legislator, Obama wasn’t able to gain entry to the floor of the Democratic presidential convention in Los Angeles. His credit card also bounced, which prevented him from hiring a car at the airport.