“In public, they smiled and waved,” Jodi Kantor writes, “but how were the Obamas really reacting to the White House?” Illustration by Barry Blitt

In “The West Wing,” employment at the White House was an invitation to a fizzy world of noble intent and screwball comedy. The spawn of William Powell and Myrna Loy aced their F.B.I. security clearances, did the world-altering work of civil seraphim, and strode endless hallways, cracking wise in pools of amber light. As it happens, to work at the White House is to wake each morning in darkness and in dread. It is not only the crises of global moment that shred the nerves. The constant tide of trivia cascading down the BlackBerry screen each morning, through Twitter and Politico, makes an aide’s first sip of coffee taste of acid reflux.

On September 16, 2010, Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s longtime press secretary, was greeted at first light with news that a book being published in France had Michelle Obama telling Carla Bruni-Sarkozy that she “can’t stand” life in the White House, that it was “hell.” Gibbs, a cantankerous Alabaman, went about strong-arming the Élysée Palace to issue a denial. The cost of failure would have been high. Like so much of the senior staff, Gibbs had, at best, a wary relationship with the First Lady. Most Americans admired Michelle Obama and were moved by her forthright intelligence and her determination to raise two normal daughters in the phantasmagorical aquarium of the White House, but the staff feared her. White House staffers always fear the First Lady. They fear, above all, her nighttime access, the pillow talk that can undo their careful planning. (Nancy Reagan was capable of persuading her Ronnie to fire a chief of staff or a Cabinet secretary with nary a glance across the TV trays.) Gibbs was immensely relieved, therefore, when he got the French to issue a denial by 11 A.M. Crisis averted.

And yet, as Jodi Kantor writes in her energetically reported “The Obamas” (Little, Brown), Valerie Jarrett came into the next day’s 7:30 A.M. staff meeting declaring darkly that the First Lady was in fact “dissatisfied” with the handling of Hellgate. Gibbs was baffled and enraged.

“Fuck this, that’s not right, I’ve been killing myself on this, where’s this coming from?” he shouted. Months of anxiety about Michelle Obama and resentment of Jarrett’s curious role as senior adviser and First Friend came to a boil. “What is it she has concerns about? What did she say to you?”

Jarrett answered vaguely.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Gibbs said. “Did you ask her?”

Jarrett said something about the denial not being fast enough.

“Why is she talking to you about it? If she has a problem she should talk to me!”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Jarrett said.

“It was Jarrett’s tone, calm to the point of condescension, that finally undid Gibbs,” Kantor writes. He seemed so “frustrated one colleague thought he was going to cry.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said.

“The first lady would not believe you’re speaking this way,” Jarrett said, still composed.

“Then fuck her, too!” Gibbs said.

In the end, it appeared that Jarrett was using the ominous threat of the First Lady’s displeasure to cover her own ineffectuality in the affair. From then on, Gibbs and Jarrett barely spoke.

Kantor nails her story—she had six sources in the room—and casts it all in the stock lexicon of D.C. confrontations: Gibbs “shook with rage” and soon “stormed out.” The rest of the group “sat stunned.” The conflict, the profanity, the yelling: it’s the sort of vivid, if ultimately meaningless, detail that provides books like “Renegade,” “Game Change,” and, now, “The Obamas” with their lurid and irresistible zing. Such books regard more earnest matters like history, context, and ideas the way a child looks at a plate of Brussels sprouts. They aim to serve up big bowls of ice cream. And, no matter what Michelle Obama counsels, we political gluttons will lick the spoon clean.

In September, 2009, Kantor interviewed the Obamas in the Oval Office for the Times Magazine. During the 2008 campaign, she had written a series of revealing stories for the paper on Obama’s past. Now she asked the Obamas how it was possible to have an equal marriage when one partner was President. “The first lady let out a sharp ‘hmmmpfh,’ as if she were relieved someone had finally asked, then let her husband suffer through the answer,” Kantor recalls. “It took him three stop-and-start tries.” Kantor noted the “subtle tension I had felt in that room.” The couple had spent much of their marriage debating “how much change was possible within the political system and whether public life could be made livable.”

A book about the Obamas’ marriage, though, starts out with a problem. As the author of “Anna Karenina” could have attested, an unhappy marriage can be unhappy—and interesting—in countless ways. By contrast, when Ian McEwan tried to portray a happy marriage in his novel “Saturday”—“What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife”—not a few critics found it unbelievable or smug. “Apparently in the purlieus of north London, or at least in McEwan’s fantasy version of them, no one suffers from morning breath, and women long-married wake up every time primed for sex,” John Banville groused. Michelle Obama, in fact, has described her husband as “snorey and stinky” of a morning. More seriously, both Obamas concede that their marriage has known its tensions and discord, particularly a decade ago, when Barack was working as an obscure state legislator in Springfield, Illinois, while Michelle tried to juggle career, children, and household back in Hyde Park. She was not pleased and made sure he knew it, loading him up with shopping lists and resentment. The Obamas still have differences: he believes in political process; she is wary of politics; he is purpose-driven, ambitious; she wants everyone home for dinner at six-thirty, no excuses; she loses her patience; he apologizes. Yet the union, as far as we know, is solid and loving; it works. Their differences seem largely complementary. As the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa said of his beloved Adrian Pennino, “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.”

The outside narrative of the Obamas’ marriage takes Michelle to be the repository of domestic wisdom, decency, and integrity. She sets the limits and hoists, when needed, an ego-deflating eyebrow. Barack may possess outsized ambition and talent, but he leaves his socks and shirts all over the place and needs to be reminded that he is not, at least at home, the Prince of Peace. One suspects that the reality is more complicated, as in any marriage. (Who would have guessed that the lip-locked Gores, and not the tempestuous Clintons, would now be rent asunder?) Still, the task remains of making a happy marriage interesting—and of doing so without the imaginative equipment and freedoms of fiction. Kantor must content herself with what details she can glean from friends and associates, many of whom, we can readily tell, are sanctioned by the Office of Communications to fill the reporter’s cup with soothing Ovaltine. Kantor is wise to this, of course, but it doesn’t make her work any easier.