Exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged

While John Bolton’s book is likely to be forgotten as soon as the next disingenuous ex post facto self-exoneration from a member of the Bush administration drops, it will always have had the virtue of producing this review from Jennifer Szalai:

Bolton, who refused to testify at the House impeachment hearings, may be the last person many Americans wish to hear from right now — not that he would ever deign to make any concessions to what a reader might want. “The Room Where It Happened,” an account of his 17 months as Trump’s national security adviser, has been written with so little discernible attention to style and narrative form that he apparently presumes an audience that is hanging on his every word.

Known as a fastidious note taker, Bolton has filled this book’s nearly 500 pages with minute and often extraneous details, including the time and length of routine meetings and even, at one point, a nap. Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies, both abroad (Iran, North Korea) and at home (the media, “the High-Minded,” the former defense secretary Jim Mattis). The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged.

Still, it’s maybe a fitting combination for a lavishly bewhiskered figure whose wonkishness and warmongering can make him seem like an unlikely hybrid of Ned Flanders and Yosemite Sam. His one shrewd storytelling choice was to leave the chapter on Ukraine for the end, as incentive for exhausted readers to stay the course. Along the way, Bolton also mentions other disconcerting situations when Trump, he says, tried to ingratiate himself to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping by dangling the possibility of removing or easing pressure on the Turkish bank Halkbank and the Chinese telecom companies ZTE and Huawei.

I think Exceedingly Tedious and Slightly Unhinged was also the title of the collected correspondence of Jonathan Safran Foer and Natalie Portman. Anyway, the whole thing is very much worth your time.

I think Paul Waldman gets this right — it’s good to same some of these details on the record, but Bolton himself deserves very little credit for putting them out there at this late date.