DUTCH: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan
• Position: Review

DUTCH: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris Random House, $35

FITTINGLY ENOUGH for a book about Ronald Reagan, I forget who told me this, but it makes sense:

Bob Loomis, the Random House editor responsible for Edmund Morris, apparently fell down on the job. Loomis should have told Morris during his "writer's-block years" to go ahead with the fictional device as a way of getting going, then stripped all of it (including Morris' poems) out of the final draft.

If Loomis had done so, Dutch would have been less controversial (maybe that's why he didn't) and a helluva lot better. The fictional world Morris creates, complete with a radical son and a group of ancient friends, is jarring, phony, boring and totally unnecessary. Most of the insights conveyed by the fictional characters could have been stated in the author's own voice, which would have been completely in tune with the quirky, epigrammatic, non-biographical tone of the rest of the book.

For instance, a fictional character explains that Nancy Reagan and Jane Wyman were cut from the same cloth: "Both bruised, flinchy, pushy, short fused to the point of paranoia, neurotically tidy, love to give orders." Good point; no need to adorn it with fiction. Same with the pithy characterizations of Reagan's men.

The biggest revelation in the book is how astonishingly ungrateful the Reagans were. When long-time devoted aide Mike Deaver got into legal trouble, they never called him. When the Bush family gave them expensive gifts, there were no thank you's. Morris asks Holmes Tuttle, a rich California car dealer and supposedly close friend, if there was anything he ever wanted in return for bankrolling Reagan's entire political career and serving in the kitchen cabinet that got him into government. Tuttle...