In March The Scrapbook introduced readers to the Boxer Prize—a very special literary award given to famous authors, typically celebrity or politician authors, whose fictional heroes bear a striking resemblance to their creators. We call it the Boxer Prize in recognition of former California senator Barbara Boxer’s stupendously bad debut novel A Time to Run, about a liberal U.S. senator who risks her career by standing up to right-wing extremists. This year we have already nominated actor Sean Penn for his debut novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, in which the story’s eponymous hero is a barely coherent and ferociously profane left-winger who at one point meets with a Mexican drug lord.
We think we have another contender: Bill Clinton. The 42nd president has coauthored a novel with thriller-writer James Patterson titled The President Is Missing. We read the book and must admit it’s a pretty fun read—though the book’s readability as a thriller, we reckon, has more to do with Patterson’s abilities (or collaborator David Ellis’s) than Clinton’s. What makes us think Clinton should be shortlisted for the Boxer Award is its main character, President Jonathan Duncan. As The Weekly Standard’s Barton Swaim explains in the Wall Street Journal,
President Duncan is given to shallow and, I think it’s fair to say, rather Clintonian reflections on what ails politics in modern America. “All too often,” he observes in a bit that sounds as if it were lifted from a State of the Union address in the late 1990s, “those who rail against ‘them’ prevail over earnest pleas to remember what ‘we’ can be and do together.” Or this: “Participation in our democracy seems to be driven by the instant-gratification worlds of Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. We’re using modern technology to revert to primitive kinds of human relations. The media knows what sells—conflict and division. It’s also quick and easy. All too often anger works better than answers; resentment better than reason; emotion trumps evidence.”
Boxer, Penn, Clinton—these people aren’t gifted writers. But at least they try to write about the one thing on which they are undisputed experts: themselves.
