Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.
Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by ‘this turkey’ in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little
cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.
Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder. The book might read as if written ‘by a committee of twenty-somethings who…sure don’t know how to
write’; but it has a detached quality that could also be ‘a perfect reflection of the president it describes’ (Obama on the 2012 election campaign).
Webb’s idea of the tone mirroring its subject matter is expanded upon by Nicholas Blincoe in the Telegraph
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