There have been several terrific novels about politics in the past decade or so. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors depicted the rise to the White House of a political couple who were despicable and beguiling by turns, and terribly reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Robert Harris’s The Ghost had readers in stitches, while at the same time mounting a disturbing critique of the thinking which emanated from Downing Street under New Labour. Curtis Sittenfeld’s elegant, surprisingly moving American Wife was an effective study-from-beneath of a marriage which in many details strongly resembled that of George and Laura Bush.

Now we have O: A Presidential Novel, which purports to tell the tale of the 2012 presidential election campaign from the perspective of the incumbent’s camp. In particular, it focuses on the fictional Cal Regan, presidential campaign manager, who is still young enough to party all night with political interns in their early twenties. Whether he is actually tough enough to go ten rounds with a political operative in the mould of Karl Rove seems doubtful, and that is one of the problems with this book. Regan and his Gen X and Gen Y pals are not particularly evil or admirable or even memorable.

The President, ‘O’, is almost a marginal figure in the novel’s action, and approximates Barack Obama so sketchily that he might be the real incumbent, or he might not. Mystifyingly, his opponent in the election, the Republicans’ presidential candidate, Tom Morrison, is much more convincingly drawn. From Morrison’s perspective, O is presented as arrogant and out of touch with ordinary Americans, undervaluing their self-reliance and overconfident of his own ability to fix the nation’s problems. But nothing happens story-wise to convince us of the truth of this view.

While O is competent enough as a primer on the ins and outs of American political campaigns, and is sometimes even a mildly entertaining read, any reader who picks it up hoping for some crucial insight into the human enigma who actually occupies the Oval Office at this challenging moment in history may well be disappointed.

Sybil Nolan is a freelance writer and editor.