Barack Obama: Making of the Man By David Maraniss, Atlantic, Rs 629

The subtitle is the key to this hefty tome. This is the President Barack Obama back-story in its minutest detail, with Obama himself not making an appearance until page 164, and his wife, Michelle, no appearance at all. The book ends with bachelor Obama, aged 27, going from Chicago to Harvard Law School, which gives scope for yet another David Maraniss door-stopper — presumably only if Obama gets a second term.

The author’s explanation for this truncated biography is that the past is never dead and is crucial to our understanding. This is not entirely convincing, as the narrative switches from various parts of the United States of America to Kenya and Indonesia, with lengthy digressions about society and politics, and a good deal of repetition and speculation. Gaps are filled with conjectures; there is much that is inconsequential and looks suspiciously like ‘padding’. The author’s quest is to discover why Obama, a multiracial person with black and white parents, and owing more to his white grandparents than anyone else, deliberately chose to present himself as black rather than white, and Maraniss leaves no stone unturned and no theory unexamined in the process.

Obama’s Kenyan father was a dandy, arrogant and self-confident. He met Obama’s mother Ann, then aged 18, in a Russian language class in Hawaii in 1961. Ann became pregnant before marriage and was unaware that her husband was already married. The father took pains to conceal his current marriage and the pregnancy even to close friends. Less than a month after the son’s birth, Ann left for Seattle, either because she discovered her husband was married or on account of physical abuse.

Obama was known as Barry or Bar. Ann returned to Hawaii and married an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro, in 1965, when Barry was just over three. In 1967, they moved to Indonesia where Barry was described as a Muslim at school because of his step-father, though Lolo was not religious and Ann was an atheist. Schoolfriends thought Barry an Ambonese because of his dark skin, and strange because he was left-handed.

Barry’s father, back in Kenya, was a middle-level civil servant, and his Indonesian step-father an oil company official. Both father and step-father were drunkards, womanizers and apt to physically abuse their wives. Barry’s father married another American who also subsequently divorced him, after bearing two sons, while Ann had a daughter with Lolo called Maya. By this time, Ann became deeply interested in anthropology and remained in Indonesia while Barry, now 10, returned to Hawaii to be looked after by Ann’s parents, Stan and Madelyn Dunham. Barry saw his father for the first and last time in 1972 in Hawaii when, providentially for him, Ann resisted her ex-husband’s appeals to rejoin him in Kenya.

Maraniss writes that Barry had “to adjust to unsettled circumstances” and carry on a long search for order and home. But he had a normal American school life, smoked pot, and dreamed of being a professional basketball player. He was learning “how to navigate in different worlds... to connect and thrive in each of them”. Maraniss gives much space to correcting or filling the gaps and equivocations in Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from my Father, and points out that in spite of what is stated there, Barry’s friends never noticed any alienation or loneliness in him.

Barry’s education was funded by scholarships, student loans and money from his grandmother. School enhanced his “exploration of black culture” and from 1979 to 1981 he attended Occidental College in California, where he made many Pakistani friends, one being a flatmate. He discovered his love of words that could move people, and decided to call himself Barack instead of Barry and his “sense of destiny deepened”. Ambition made him transfer to Columbia University in New York for a political science degree, where his use of pot declined but his heavy smoking continued. As before, he had many Pakistani friends, with whom he lived both then and after college. He even made a trip to Pakistan for three weeks, aged 20, to see them, and after his degree, met them again in Singapore in 1983.

“Readers of biographies like their meat raw,” claimed Robertson Davies, and Obama’s romantic relationships with two white women in New York has been given much prominence by the author and the media because one of them allowed Maraniss access to her diary. Obama dropped this girlfriend by the callous expedient of not calling her back because he apparently did not want to be drawn into a white world — although he had yet another white girlfriend in Chicago with whom he also broke up on account of his next “career move”. One girlfriend shrewdly commented that “Barack needed to go black”, but no relationships with non-white girlfriends are cited in this narrative.

Obama’s first jobs in New York were as a journalist with Business International and a non-profit public action group before he moved to Chicago as a community organizer activist in 1985 — “his motivation was to gain credentials in the black world”. He still fraternized with Pakistanis, and initially lived with one at Chicago, but was distancing himself to establish his “political identity”. He soon involved himself with the black Baptist church, where Reverend Love was his colleague and mentor, and Jeremiah Wright his pastor.

Obama’s mother Ann, who died in 1995 aged 52, was something of a saint. Warm and kind, she betrayed no animosity towards her two ex-husbands. Her children were fed on myths that their Kenyan and Indonesian fathers had “regal blood” and were protected from the reality of parental abandonment. She never asked for child support or property in her divorces from either husband. On the other hand, Barack was condescending to his mother, and detached from her and his half-sister when they met in New York and Indonesia, although he derived his drive and willpower from Ann.

Obama’s father was manipulative. He married four times — two Kenyan women and two Americans — and died in a car crash in 1982. Before going to Harvard, Obama visited Kenya where he “enjoyed the comfort, the firmness of identity” with his father’s numerous kinsmen — though a meeting with his father’s second American wife was understandably frigid.

Maraniss describes Obama as a “master of diversity”, although Barack displays self-pity when he wrote that he was “caught without a class, a structure or tradition”. In spite of all the detail, there is no key here that unlocks Obama’s overriding ambition and self-confidence. He comes across as cold and calculating, cautious and unwilling to take risks until every option was weighed in the balance. The microscopic detail of the Obama family tree and all its branches will be a treasure trove for Obama enthusiasts, but will have little impact on other readers. In an election year, it is doubtful whether Maraniss has done Obama any favours with the American electorate.