Book Review: ‘The President Is Missing’ by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

President Bill Clinton and writer James Patterson have teamed up to write a novel together titled “The President Is Missing”.

The book opens with a charged scene in which President Jonathan Duncan is participating in a mock hearing to prepare for a congressional inquiry investigating the botched attempt to capture a terrorist. His staff has strongly advised him against testifying. “My opponents really hate my guts,” Duncan thinks, but “here I am”: just one honest man “with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor.”

This action packed thriller arches more closely toward plausibility in its geopolitical subplots, threats against the Saudi king, malicious Russian meddling in world affairs and its main story line of a president who ditches his handlers and goes rogue from the White House.  Surely, no black felt-tip pens went dry redacting classified material from this manuscript. “The President Is Missing” reveals as many secrets about the U.S. government as “The Pink Panther” reveals about the French government. And yet it provides plenty of insight on the former president’s ego.

Being president is a profound honor, but it can also be the most difficult job in the world. Because every day brings something new and it’s not all good. – says President Clinton at an interview during his book tour.

As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments for years. Both men lost their fathers early and rose from hardscrabble circumstances to become governors. Both men met their brilliant wives in law school, and both couples have one daughter.  But then we come to the curious differences: Rather than shrewdly avoiding military service, President Duncan is a celebrated war hero. Rather than being pleasured in the Oval Office by an intern, Duncan was tortured in Iraq by the Republican Guard. And rather than being the subject of innumerable rumors about extramarital affairs, Duncan was wholly devoted to his late wife and now lives in apparent celibacy.

Duncan is facing possible impeachment for allegedly having a telephone conversation with Cindoruk and striking some kind of deal after letting him escape during a special forces attack. Did he? And why? A house select committee wants to know.

All becomes tediously clear soon enough. Duncan is a stoic boy scout. A former governor of North Carolina, he served and was wounded in Iraq. He’s also a widower with a daughter and suffers from immune thrombocytopenia, a debilitating blood disorder. Choosing to carry the burden of the ghastly truth about Cindoruk’s conspiracy – codenamed “Dark Ages” – on his own, Duncan decides to sneak out of the White House in a disguise to tackle the threat.

The novel is fascinating in its own weird way, and patient thriller fans who like their assassins creepily sexy (yes, there’s a female assassin), their plots thick with duplicity and their time-ticking countdown stakes high are likely to find this a diverting-enough beach read.  Like many thrillers, ‘The President Is Missing‘ sprinkles action-filled set pieces throughout.

Billed as “the publishing event of the year,” this 500-page doorstop has required an unprecedented double-colophon collaboration, mashing up Patterson’s longtime publisher (Little, Brown) with Clinton’s (Knopf Doubleday). The back-end headaches according to several sources, Knopf spearheaded the publicity while Little, Brown oversaw marketing, sales, and shipping hardly mattered when selling out a 1.2 million-copy opening print run seemed a sure thing. In any event, it would make this one of the largest, if not the largest, releases of 2018.

In other words, ‘The President Is Missing‘ should be perfectly engineered to be the Big Beach Read of the Summer. The experience of reading the book, however, proves far less interesting than the experience of understanding why it exists in the first place. The attempt to combine the hallmark economy of a James Patterson novel with Bill Clinton’s overly verbose style creates a strange sensation, as if you were driving a Porsche 911 whose engine had been secretly replaced with one from a Ford Taurus.