I haven’t read Barack Hussein Obama’s semi-fictional “autobiography,” Dreams From My Father, in its entirety — it’s dreadfully solipsistic, and aside from some cheap scenes of victimhood-induced emotion, neither particularly well written nor well organized. It positively screams “amateurish,” which was enough for me.

But everything I needed to know about the Punahou School I learned as a student at the best high school in Honolulu, if not America — St. Louis (founded by Catholic missionaries in 1846, just five years after Punahou), which, as the president’s bad luck would have it, I attended as a freshman and sophomore between 1963 and 1965. As luck would further have it, I also took a summer school class in 1964 at the nearby University of Hawaii, and spent some time at the now-notorious East-West center, where Barack Hussein Obama I and Stanley Anne Dunham are said to have met just a few years before. Still…

Tell me we wouldn’t be different if we was white. Or Japanese.

Let me just say this to you haoles (in my experience, the word is most often is uttered with a pungent descriptive adjective that begins with an “f” attached): I would be amazed if Barack Hussein Obama II ever experienced a single moment of hostility based solely on his skin color during his Hawaiian high school days.

For one simple reason: except for the white minority, everybody’s skin in Hawaii is some shade of brown. The mainland liberals’ racial paradigm — oppressive white minority, oppressing helpless black minority — simply does not obtain there. If anything, the situation is reversed. Obama’s “the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds” is simply false in a place where almost everyone is a “mulatto.”

Please. My two best friends at St. Louis were a Japanese-Okinawan (who later went on to Columbia and became a college professor) and an Air Force officer’s kid who now lives in London. If you want to see “diversity,” take a look at our yearbooks — and our homerooms were hierarchically organized by test scores (common back then); as I recall, St. Louis offered full scholarships to the top three eight-graders taking its entrance examination, and I was one of them.

Further — and unless I’ve missed it — something that’s conspicuously missing from Dreams is any flavor of the lingua franca of the islands, Hawaiian pidgin — a blend of English, Hawaiian, Portuguese and various East Asian languages (including Japanese, Chinese and Tagalog). It’s the language of the streets, the way we all communicated outside the classroom, although the Marianists of St. Louis ruthlessly suppressed it in the classroom.

The situation was probably similar at Punahou, although perhaps less so as — in fairness to the president — Punahou was a far whiter school than St. Louis — or any of the other big high Honolulu high schools – being the place where the native white aristocracy sent their children; in The Descendants, even George Clooney sent his kids there.

But, reading Dreams, I get no sense, linguistically, that Obama ever actually experienced or engaged Hawaii, other than as a place to smoke pot; it would be a hoot to see one of the White House reporters stand up and ask Obama a question in rapid-fire pidgin and see what his reaction would be. Quick, somebody send Neil Munro to Hawaii! Or I suppose I could do it myself…

(For an excellent primer on pidgin — spoken at a fraction of its normal patois speed, and with subtitles, watch this excellent video. For a real vox populi slice of pidgin, click here. One time, bra! as we say in the Islands.)

What’s left of Barack Obama’s “memoir,” Dreams of My Father, once all the composites and outright fabrications are factually discounted?

After all, it was Obama’s “compelling personal narrative” that got the media poodle dogs so enamored of him that they propelled him to the presidency, yipping foolishly about its being the “best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician” (Joe Klein, the ahistorical naif who wrote that, obviously never heard of, much less read, Grant’s memoirs), and barking that Obama was “the smartest guy ever to become president” (Michael Beschloss), based on nothing more than the astral projection of their own wishful magical thinking.

And yet… what if very little of Dreams is true? As Andrew Ferguson notes of the semi-fictional character of “Ray” in Dreams — to take just one example of many — in his review of Maraniss’s book:

“Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese.”

Racial resentment is the key to Ray. In Maraniss’s words, he’s “a symbol of young blackness, a mix of hot anger and cool detachment,” racially authentic in a way none of Obama’s other friends were. He provides a crucial example of the resentment that Obama is tempted by but at last outgrows.

But Ray wasn’t really there​—​didn’t exist, in fact. Ray is a “reinvention” of one of Obama’s friends, Maraniss tells us. His mother was half-black and half-American Indian; his father was . . . Japanese. His name was Keith Kakugawa, and he had no trouble dating white girls; his girlfriend at the time was the base admiral’s daughter. Maraniss discovered that Obama’s luck with girls, whatever their melanin count, was just as robust as Keith’s. With a Japanese name, Kakugawa would have trouble​—​more trouble than half-black Barry Obama​—​identifying himself as an African American and speaking as one. If Kakugawa was Ray, then the rants and the attitudes they represent are in this instance made up, and the story line of Dreams​—​the story of Obama’s life as we have learned it​—​loses an essential foil.

“Somewhere between pseudonymous and fictitious,” Maraniss writes, gently as always, “Ray was the first of several distorted or composite characters employed in Dreams for similar purposes.”

But it’s the purposes themselves that are worrisome. Maraniss cuts Obama much more slack than he would, say, if he were an editor at the Washington Post magazine fact-checking a memoir he hoped to publish. He’s right to accept some invention from a memoirist who insists on telling his story through precise rendering of scenes and dialogue. But a memoir is just realist fiction unless the “composite” says and does things that were done and said by someone. In Dreams many of the crucial epiphanies, the moments that advance the narrator’s life and understanding to its closing semi-resolution, didn’t happen.

In short, Dreams is closer to fiction than fact — the opposite of most Upper West Side poetaster “novels,” which are really romans a clef with the names barely changed.