All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

If you're like me, you find it almost irresistible to be suspicious of a book like this. After all, most memoirs that are so heavily trumpeted don't live up to the fanfare, and All's Fair is, well, being trumpeted blaringly. James Carville and Mary Matalin received almost a million dollar advance to tell the story of their oddball romance and to wax about their roles in opposing camps in the 1992 presidential election. Capitalizing on the Hatfield-and-McCoy quality of their marriage, rivals Simon & Schuster and Random House are making a big deal about their co-publishing the book. And in keeping with the circus atmosphere surrounding their book's release, Carville and Matalin have even posed for publicity photos with a live donkey and elephant.

I think my suspicions were merited. First off, All's Fair tends to be disappointingly short on the kind of insider gossip that makes politico memoirs so much fun. Sure, Carville takes a few shots at longtime Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright for screwing up the Clinton response to George Bush's charge that he raised taxes 128 times. And Matalin piles on John Sununu, bashing the already-pummeled former chief of staff for being dictatorial. But there's nothing here so interesting as, for example, the nugget in Donald Regan's memoirs that Ronald Reagan took political counsel from Nancy's astrologer.

More important, the book does only a modest job of explaining the Carville-Matalin relationship and why it works despite their political differences. As you read the book--which is divided into chunks marked "Mary" and "James" and (ghost)written in their respective voices--some things about their relationship do make sense. Their politics aren't all that far apart. She is prochoice, for instance. He despairs about liberal elitism in the Democratic Party on issues such as arts and abortion funding. Both are basically moderates. Beyond politics, other things bind them. They share a blue-collar, hard-knocks kind of background. He grew up in tiny Carville, Louisiana, the son of a postal worker dad and a mom who sold encyclopedias. Carville reminds us constantly that it was only after a series of botched careers--Marine, science teacher, small-time lawyer--that his life hit an upward trajectory. In one hard luck scene set in 1984, he is crying on the platform of Washington's Union Station, 38, completely broke, with nowhere to go after Gary Hart's presidential campaign, itself broke, said it couldn't pay him for the office work he was doing at its headquarters. Matalin's rise was not much different. The granddaughter of Croatian immigrants, she grew up in ethnic Chicago and went through several career miscues--including a stint as a beautician--before rising in politics.

Their marriage is bound, too, by a sassy lightheartedness. There's James in the now-in-famous Clinton campaign War Room, offering volunteers $100 if he can crack eggs over their heads; there's Mary leading a conga line down the aisle of Air Force One. When...