The President is Missing will make for rapt, and for many, even obsessive, reading. Whatever the internal division of labor between Clinton and Patterson, the book is outstanding. It is a compelling thriller that gets you to care about the varied people in it and what happens to them while you inhabit the world it creates. There are one or two unresolved loose ends (I won’t spoil it by saying which ones). But that does not undermine the novel’s notably compelling characters, its deep insider’s view of the White House and politics, and the velocity that compels readers to turn each page with eager anticipation.
Clinton and Patterson’s fictional commander in chief brims with humanity, character and stoicism ... Without divulging any of the satisfying plot twists, I can report that the novel unspools smoothly. Only in its final pages does it get bogged down with a few too many unsubtle messages about the current state of our politics ... It explores the thin line between loyalty and duty on one side and resentment and temptation on the other that can corrupt even the most honorable of public servants, and it shines a spotlight on the deep commitment of America’s adversaries to tear us apart and weaken our standing in the world.
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 ... 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 ... for much of The President Is Missing, Patterson seems to have deferred to the First Writer. That’s a problem. When we pick up a thriller this silly, we want underwear models shooting Hellfire missiles from hang gliders; Clinton gives us Cabinet members questioning each other over Skype ... The larger problem, though, is how cramped the novel’s scope remains. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password.
...the entire novel has an air of narrative lockdown, with Duncan seldom interacting with anyone beyond his immediate circle or his international peers, even after he has flown the official coop. His pronouncements, on the page, evince an ardent faith in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but you badly want him to hang out with the people ... Whatever the ratio of their labors, one thing is certain: everything you expect from Patterson is here, unadulterated, right down to the ritual mixing of the metaphors ... In short, not even an ex-President, for all his heft and influence, can mar the charms of so transcendent a technique, or curb its ability to suck us in...It goes without saying that The President Is Missing is written in the present tense, or, to be accurate, in a specialist subset of that tense. Think of it as the hysteric present ... Let’s be fair, though. Somehow, The President Is Missing rises above its blithely forgivable faults. It’s a go-to read. It maximizes its potency and fulfills its mission. There’s a twist or two of which Frederick Forsyth might be proud. So, if you want to make the most of your late-capitalist leisure-time, hit the couch, crack a Bud, punch the book open, focus your squint, and enjoy.
Patterson ensures the plot purrs like a finely tuned machine ... Some readers may be disappointed that the premise inherent in the title is a bit of a head fake, and the battle-hardened Duncan doesn’t really go off the grid to tangle with the bad guys mano a mano. But what does happen is ultimately more plausible ... Clinton doesn’t help us steer clear of comparisons, for it’s his voice we hear as the narrator whopops up time and again to justify his actions in the face of ignorant opposition, to opine on the state of the republic, to offer geopolitical lessons, and to remind us just how much he feels everyone’s pain ... Is this book intended to be a real caution about a serious threat? If so, it’s a curious vehicle, but perhaps appropriate to the time in which we live. Half thriller, half policy primer, this is a strangely compelling addition to Clinton’s presidential papers.
The novel, though too long and — except for the threat of cyberterrorism — ludicrous in its plot elements, does have a satisfying twist at the end. So, we wonder: Who wrote what? Patterson is known for providing the plots and outlines for many of his countless books and then delegating the actual writing to a co-author, but it is hard to envision such a master-assistant relationship in the present case. Bill Clinton no doubt contributed his melancholy experience with political inquisitions, his persecution by a vicious media, his understanding of the burdens presidents bear, and a concluding speech that goes on and on in the grand Clintonian manner. And, perhaps, too, it was his fertile imagination that created the selfless, compassionate, fantastically brave, high-minded president at the book’s center.
The President Is Missing is not a good book, but it is a fun one. There’s no reason for it to be 500 pages long. Finishing it, you have that feeling of opening a bag of potato chips that is only a quarter of the way full. Why put so little into something so big? The plot arc is simple, the details are fun, the solution to the mystery is really obvious, and it’s way too long. That doesn’t mean I don’t like potato chips. But there’s an ickiness to this book, and it lies in gender politics. It’s just not possible to engage with Bill Clinton as a public figure without thinking about his relationship with the 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky ... To boot, the book ends with the revelation that the villain all along was feminism. Having nurtured a grudge against the sexist media for years, one of Duncan’s closest advisers loses her entire moral compass ... It’s a weird old clang, and it’s even weirder that nobody in Clinton’s camp—for I can’t believe this book didn’t receive the eyeballs of many a sycophantic aide, prior to publication—thought it was weird. Women’s resentment does have an extraordinarily long shelf-life, as Clinton himself is finding out. But that doesn’t mean he should have written a novel about it.
The novel tries its luck, and its readers’ patience, when it pulls the same trick ... Duncan has snuck out of the White House, entirely alone ... Some of the slack comes from the inevitable sermonizing. I can see why Clinton might have thought it a neat idea to use a thriller as a pulpit, but a thriller isn’t the ideal place—as if there were an ideal place—to read Clinton’s thoughts on the perniciousness of social media...the press...the erosion of trust in public life etc. And, more than that, the main thrust of the book’s rhetorical intent backfires. One implication of the title is that the United States is currently missing a president in an all too real sense: Donald Trump is an impostor, an aberration, unfit for office ... Duncan is an idealized president, intended to remind Americans of the kind of person who ought to inhabit the White House, so very unlike its current occupant— and, let’s be honest, a fair few of his predecessors.
...this is the sort of sub–Tom Clancy thriller that simultaneously preaches a dreary populism and believes its readers are too stupid to understand dialogue that isn’t enunciated on the page ... Obviously, one should be careful not to project too much authorial autobiography onto a novel’s protagonist. But the parallels here are comically hard to ignore—and if you, a former president, opt to co-write a thriller starring a current president, you are shamelessly inviting them ... it’s notable that these two men, respectively renowned for their powers of narration and oration, seem unable to overcome the challenge of composing good prose. Part of the problem is their fondness for mixed metaphors ... How can one not pity a poll-obsessed politician—and erstwhile political genius—who writes a novel in which he is transformed into a brave war hero with everything going for him except political skill, but still feels the need to, on the third-to-last page, inform the exhausted reader that the American people love him after all?
...a trashy, trashy-fun airport potboiler ... fans of this kind of book will probably be satisfied with this one. The plot clips along on short chapters and frequent cliffhangers, and there aren’t huge, embarrassing whiffs in the prose. (Though references to an assassin’s breasts—at various times described as her 'boobs' and her 'girls'—are particularly icky given Clinton’s inability to own up to his history.) ... Patterson is hardly an exemplary stylist, but he knows how to structure and pace these things to get the job done. Pretty much every development is preposterous...but enjoyably so. That this is what Clinton, a well-read man in both history and literature, wanted to spend time on is kind of endearing, as though he were sheepishly showing off his train set. On the other hand, you can’t remove the context of the former president writing this book. What to make of the fact that the terrorist antagonist gropes women as a sign of his evil? Should we read anything into how, in The President Is Missing, the first lady is dead? ... Reading between these lines is more fun than reading the lines themselves, as the details of the plot come standard issue from the genre.
This novel is indeed missing several things, including a believable plot and even the remotest sense of narrative tension. The president, however, is not one of them. OK, so he briefly slips out of the White House minus his Secret Service detail, the better that he might meet an actress friend who will give him distracting new eyebrows to match the beard he has grown in record time (so very manly, this particular leader of the western world). On the other hand, given that he is the novel’s principal narrator, we always know where he is, be it bunker or bathroom. He’s also, incidentally, just about the most reliable narrator ever written in English, even if he does say everything in a present tense so weirdly emphatic and muddled, you half wonder if American is his first language—or his second ('Her face once again becomes a poker-face wall'). He does not lie. He does not dissemble. If he tells us he’s 'enjoying the comfort' of the embrace of the Israeli prime minister—don’t panic: it’s not what you think—we’d better believe him.
The pages of The President Is Missing are filled with the classic tropes of a big commercial thriller, from ticking countdown clocks and Hollywood-worthy disguises to clipped prose that ratchets up the suspense. But the authors resist pure escapism: this novel is rife with political statements. Preaching about truth in politics or suggesting basic policy prescriptions for veterans’ care, police violence and immigration sometimes make what should be a light summer read feel more like a campaign platform. But the plot is nothing if not timely ... The pleasure of this book is in imagining the wild tales Clinton might disclose about his own years as President, if only he could.
An overheated, logic-defying, over-long thriller about cyber terrorism that thrives on breathless Homeland-style pyrotechnics — brought to an occasional screeching halt by policy-wonk digressions ... 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.
Clinton, offering the inside scoop on life in the White House, and Patterson, spinning a tense plot, are a dynamic duo weaving a suspenseful and gripping technohriller that will leave readers wondering, 'Could this really happen?' Highly recommended for thriller and suspense fans.
I’ve never wished I had a grandfather more than in contending with this book-shaped blob of paranoia and vanquished machismo; I need somebody with a stake in James Patterson (or rather the fiction-production factory to which he lends his name) to translate this bulletin of xenophobia and disposable TV patriotism for my benefit. But I must persevere. For the duration of this review, I will strive to become my own grandpa ... a gross and gristly wank of a book that oozes contempt for the press and democratic norms. Throughout, Duncan delivers banal talking points on the opioid crisis, gun laws, climate change, affordable health care, and racism, but because he so clearly despises due process—his authoritarian sense of superiority is beyond question—the effect is to make him sound less like a tenderhearted head of state and more like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho ... The President is Missing is, on the one hand, a harmless airplane book and a flippant curiosity by an ex-president playing James Bond with the help of a legion of hack writers...But it’s also an indulgent white man’s daydream about casual abuse of power from a president famous for casual abuses of power.
Patterson, who never knowingly writes a paragraph when a single sentence will do, also seems highly unlikely to have authored all the prose-blocks of sorrowful asides on the state of the media and politics today ... Throughout, the story regularly halts for folksy homilies on police shootings of African Americans (bad), stricter gun control (good), or the desirability of friendly relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia. But never mind, because soon we will cut to a sexy vegetarian assassin dangling from a tree, or a silent helicopter making stuff blow up, or Secret Service men clenching their jaws in moodily lit rooms as their maverick president plans to do something they don’t like. As long as it concentrates on this stuff, the forthcoming Showtime TV series will no doubt be a hit.
Mr. Patterson (whom I take to be the primary fashioner of this book) uses short chapters to push the narrative relentlessly forward, withholds details until the moment of maximum dramatic effect and creates a few characters so tantalizingly strange that you can almost see them ... Mr. Patterson’s strength is pacing and suspense rather than style or subtlety—artless tough-guy vernacular is thick on the page ... But the plot resolves nicely and not in the way you’re likely to foresee. This is beach reading of a high order ... platitudinous interjections weigh the book down, even if they don’t ruin it. Mr. Clinton adds nothing to the book’s value as a thriller but much to its capacity for publicity.
The book makes no claims to serious consideration, either literary or political; it is a standard-issue product, similar in plot and tone to a thousand other suspense stories in print and film ... I read The President Is Missing with the sense that [Clinton] relished the opportunity that fiction provides to give the public a perfected version of himself ... Clinton and Patterson are far from the first people to imagine the president as an action hero ... But it has always been a sinister trope, and to see it endorsed by an actual ex-president only makes it more so ... In The President Is Missing, Clinton gets to play at being one of those rule-breaking presidents, rather than the battle-scarred veteran of the Lewinsky scandal ... when an ex-president can put his name to such fantasies and see them become a bestseller, it is a sign that something is very wrong with the American imagination of power.
...a page-turning thriller that rivals the best work of such genre titans as Brad Meltzer and Vince Flynn ... The authors keep the suspense high as Duncan dodges bullets from a master assassin, deals with his deteriorating health from a blood clotting disorder, and strives to unmask a traitor among his inner circle of advisers. Fans of the TV series 24 and the movie Air Force One will be riveted.
