The actor David Niven was once badgered by the American columnist William F. Buckley to introduce him to Marc Chagall, a neighbour of Niven’s in Switzerland. Buckley, a keen amateur painter, wanted to know what Chagall thought of his work. With grave misgivings, Niven agreed to set up a meeting. Chagall in silence gazed at Buckley’s pictures for some time until Buckley could restrain himself no longer. ‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked — whereupon Chagall clapped his hand to his brow and groaned, ‘Poor paint!’
I felt something similar on reading this book about Hillary Clinton’s time as US Secretary of State. It’s not that it’s slapdash, or short on detail — quite the reverse; it’s just that its two authors hurl themselves at the English language like two treefellers with a very big axe.
Right from the off, it’s plain that Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are hellbent on breaking the record for shoehorning as much extraneous detail into one sentence as possible. With what now seems hopeless naivete, I thought their description of Hillary Clinton’s former senior adviser, Capricia Marshall, would take some beating:
A brunette with a chic short haircut and highlights, the half-Croatian and half-Mexican Marshall, who favored rigorous P90X workouts, went way back with the Clintons.
That, though, was before I came to the pen-portrait of Jared Cohen, who used to be on Clinton’s police planning staff:
Thin, with curly black hair and blue eyes that come alive when he talks about a new idea, Cohen is a native of Weston, Connecticut, a wealthy New York suburb where the median income reaches nearly $200,000 a year.
Yet somewhere in here — albeit buried several fathoms deep — is a fascinating story: how did Hillary Clinton go from being Barack Obama’s embittered rival to his most trusted colleague? Before becoming Secretary of State, Clinton had never run a government department before.
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