In the bookshops, The Audacity of Hope is prominently displayed alongside Hillary Clinton’s deathly dull Living History (subtext: I’ve Been Around for Ages) and Madam President: Is America Ready to Send Hillary Clinton to the White House? But the book that really ought to be there is Obama's Dreams from my Father (Canongate Books £11.69). This is Obama’s story of his own life, and gets closer to the core question: who is this guy?

Both of Obama’s books are surprisingly good. They are not standard-issue American pap of the kind traditionally turned out by politicians seeking high office – or, more accurately, by their staffs. I’ve read (enough of) John Kerry’s and Hillary’s efforts to be familiar with the genre. To be fair, Al Gore’s contribution from 1992, Earth in the Balance, was a more substantial piece of work – what was most notable about it was the extent to which it was forgotten by Gore as Vice President.

The thing about Obama is that he can write. Like a dream. And think. Like an intellectual. He is America’s first truly postmodern politician, in that he is searingly honest about himself in a way that is entirely self-promoting. He manages to reflect on the dilemmas and compromises required by practical politics, as he makes his accommodations, in a way that makes him seem honest rather than opportunist.

One of the key vignettes in Dreams from My Father comes when, as a community organiser in Chicago, he worked with Catholic churches. “Why are you here?” asked Mary one of the church leaders. “Doing this work, I mean?”

“For the glamour,” Obama replied.

“No, I’m serious. You said yourself you don’t need this job. And you’re not very religious, are you?”

“Well ...” Obama began, before they were interrupted. At the end of the day, after an emotional church meeting about why today’s children “seem worried all the time, mad about something”, Obama said goodbye to Mary. “You know what you were asking before. About why I do this. It had something to do with the meeting tonight. I mean ... I don’t think our reasons are all that different.”

Obama has always been a natural seeker of the common ground.

His style is novelistic, with touches of Saul Bellow, another adopted son of Chicago, and European in its sensibility.

He makes his search for his own identity, the search of a mixed-race boy whose father disappeared from the story early on, into a retelling of the American Dream – he is big on dreams, so that he never has to say “I have a dream” and yet everyone knows what he means.

Both of Obama’s books are beguilingly well written. Both of them are also unsatisfying. The refusal to be pinned down becomes tiring: I gave up both halfway through. But that nebulousness is not the same as shallowness. Obama’s writing confirms that he has the qualities that may be just what is required. As George Packer says in The New Yorker of the often-made JFK comparison: “The question is whether these are again times when an inspirational figure can change the country simply by being in the White House.” Dreams from My Father is the book I picked up again because it gives a much stronger sense than The Audacity of Hope of who Barack Obama is: outsider, healer and master of language.