My Life
by Bill Clinton
Hutchinson £25, pp957

So here it is - at nearly 1,000 pages and about 500,000 words - the manifesto for Bill Clinton's third, and most important, campaign: his continuing appeal for history's mandate.

All his life, the poor, overweight scholarship boy from the Arkansas backwoods has been driven 'to keep score'. When he was President, he used to ask friends how he measured up to the American giants of the recent past - Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman. Now, out of office, and still only 57, he has sought out Clio, the muse of history and tried to wrestle her into submission.

Just as, in his presidency, he gave voice to the highest aspirations, but left office in a storm of obloquy, so in his long-awaited multi-million-dollar autobiography, he exhorts himself on the first page to write 'a good book' - and then betrays his ambitions in a self-indulgent, over-therapised ramble.

It is, at least, all his own work. No ghosts were involved in this battle with his private and public demons. At the end, Clinton thanks a long list of editors, aides and researchers but, first to last, this appeal to posterity reads like a book written longhand on yellow legal pads. No doubt it was scrubbed up and buffed by other hands and fact-checked to within an inch of its life, but it's still the testament of the defiant, half-smiling figure on the cover: the man from Hope, Arkansas, originally known as William Jefferson Blythe III. 'It sure is a good story,' he says, with the expert yarn-spinner's guile.

My Life is really two books. The first and better half, narrates Clinton's roller-coaster political apprenticeship up to the triumphant presidential campaign of 1992. Here 'Bubba' the southerner writes affectingly about his extended family, his beloved mother, his stepfather, Roger, a violent drunk, and his burgeoning political awareness.

Even as a teenager, Clinton was shaping up to be a monster of egomania. 'I sometimes question the sanity of my existence,' he wrote in high school. 'I am a living paradox... loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity... I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day... I! I, me, mine... the only things that enable worthwhile uses of these words are the universal good qualities... faith trust, love, responsibility, regret, knowledge.'

Clinton also uses the first half of My Life to cook up a half-baked theory of 'parallel lives', a vital element in the defence of his behaviour in the White House. Clinton's theory is not just a self-justifying restatement of a truism about all public lives, it also attempts to attribute his inner 'demons of self-doubt and impending destruction' to his childhood exposure to his stepfather's terrifying violence (on one occasion actually firing a gun at his family).

As he does throughout this book, Clinton revels in the inner-outer dichotomy. 'My outside life,' he writes, 'was filled with friends and fun, learning and doing. My internal life was full of uncertainty, anger and a dread of ever-looming violence.'

Clever, charming, articulate, happy-go-lucky, 'Bubba' seemed to rise above all this. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, missed Vietnam, met and married Hillary Rodham and, by the age of 34, was 'the youngest ex-governor in American history'. The second, public life that grew out of the first is the one his readers will know about, and it is both less and more interesting than the first. The many thousands of Americans who buy My Life will get a souvenir of eight tumultuous years, and a portrait of a big, undisciplined, contradictory President who exasperates as much as he inspires.

Much of Clinton's writing about the White House years comes from a card-index, a scissors-and-paste job of gossip, congressional in-fighting and legislative score-keeping: health care, welfare reform etc. Woven into this wonky record are Clinton's intermittently fascinating asides. What else do we discover? He adores mango ice cream; he plays Boggle.

Eternally self-obsessed, Clinton is not very self-aware and surprisingly inept at judging the impression he creates of being a country hick at large in the inner circles of Washington. His account of the crisis that nearly brought him down is painfully awkward. He refers to his 'inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky' and admits he was 'disgusted with myself' and 'ashamed' of his 'immoral and foolish' behaviour.

But then he goes to ground and starts the instinctive comeback: 'I didn't want the American people to know I'd let them down. It was like living in a nightmare. I was back to my parallel lives with a vengeance.'

When impeachment looms, the awkwardness becomes mulish defiance. The process was not about him, but 'about power', pursued 'by Republicans who wanted to pursue an agenda I opposed and had blocked'. Well, up to a point. The paradox is that the President who repeatedly says he wanted to bring the country together had actually divided it neatly down the middle, as the 2000 elections proved. But that wasn't his problem. He puts the best spin he can on Gore's failure, then puts his past behind him, settling down to stake his claim on history.

And so to My Life, a book that, even before publication, has begun to arouse atavistic partisan reactions. Last weekend, the New York Times, never kind to Clinton, published a withering review, describing the book as 'a mirror of his presidency' - a hodge-podge of lies and statistics.

So what kind of man do we find in these pages? The answer is: not the man we thought we would. The most remarkable thing about My Life, which was apparently written in a hurry to a publisher's deadline, is how few of Clinton's extraordinary rhetorical gifts translate to the colder medium of the printed page. It is emphatically not a joy to read.

For the best part of his career, Clinton was a national storyteller on an epic scale. At his finest, for example in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, he provided his people with an indispensable consolation. His success came from his inclusive personal style. In his book, sadly, his monomania has got the better of him. The only narrative he wants to tell is his own.

Those who can remember the minutiae of the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals will be able to judge how candid he is, but there's no doubt that this volume is utterly self-serving. For every line of contrition, there are two of self-justification. For every attempt at atonement, there is yet another display of self-aggrandisement.

It is often said that if he were to run for office tomorrow he would win by a landslide. My Life lends some weight (nearly 4lbs) to that argument. This is a campaigning document. Alas, a book tour is a poor substitute for the campaign trail. Clinton's tragedy is Sisyphean: he will always be rolling the horrendous boulder of his flawed presidency uphill. Time and again, at the very crest, he will be dragged down once more by questions of character, accusations of dishonesty and insinuations of corruption. Perhaps he knows this. It may be 'a good story', but it still awaits a novelist or playwright to bring it to life in American prose.