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I HAVE PAGES and pages of notes, scribbled on a yellow pad as I read. But My Life is a sprawling mess of a book, and it’s impossible to summarize. Clinton writes about his Aunt Ilaree, who hiked up her skirt and showed Hillary a nine-pound tumor on her leg the very first time they met. (Hillary did not flee screaming, which is pretty good evidence that she truly loved Bill.) He tells us how much he loves Elvis Presley, and proceeds to offer a rather detailed plot synopsis of The King’s first movie, Love Me Tender. (That’s how you wind up with 957 pages.) In one of the most fully developed sections of the book, about his years as governor, he writes about his battles with President Jimmy Carter over Cuban refugees being sent to Arkansas. Clinton apparently recalls every teacher he ever had, what they taught, and what lessons he took away from their courses. He says Robert Kennedy was the first New Democrat, which I guess amounts to a postmortem endorsement. Speaking of which: he tells us that he read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death on his and Hillary’s honeymoon. How romantic! He seems to remember every country visited, issue explored, piece of legislation signed, and meeting attended during his entire eight years as president, and he describes them all at great length but with little depth.

Thus does Clinton the author reveal himself to be as undisciplined as Clinton the president. A leader’s first task is to set priorities. Clinton, though, tells us that everything is important, and that therefore no one thing is any more important than anything else. Joe Klein once memorably described Clinton’s governing style as "promiscuous," neatly drawing an analogy between his inability to control his enormous appetites with his failure to set clear goals for his administration. (Not that there weren’t significant accomplishments, starting with the tax hike and spending cuts that led to a balanced budget.) There’s not much sex in My Life, but the book is promiscuous. His recitation of college courses and professors all these years later remind us of how awed he — a middle-class Arkansas boy from a chaotic and abusive household — must have been to find himself in the rarified atmosphere of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. Yet it shows us, too, that he never really got over that awe; that, as a 58-year-old ex-president, he remains in some ways as unformed today as he was then.

Amid this literary chaos, two narrative strands emerge that are worth reading and pondering. The first is how the "vast right-wing conspiracy," as Hillary Clinton memorably labeled it, tried to destroy him, and nearly succeeded. The second is about Clinton’s failed attempts to reach a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The former is a frightening cautionary tale; for all Clinton’s refusal to take full responsibility for his actions, the war that the right waged against him from the moment he began his presidential campaign was relentless, built largely on a pile of lies, and profoundly anti-democratic. The latter is a tragedy. The two sides came so close during Clinton’s presidency, and are so far apart today.

Clinton repeatedly takes us to what he calls "Whitewater World," and every trip is surreal. Though the term itself pertains only to an Arkansas real-estate investment on which Clinton lost money, Whitewater is also shorthand for the entire scandal machine devoted first to stopping Clinton’s election, in 1992, and then to throwing him out of office.

The list of non-scandalous scandals that the right tried to pin on Clinton was mind-boggling — from an Arkansas bank failure to firings in the White House travel office, from Hillary Clinton’s lost-and-found billing records to the suicide of Clinton’s long-time friend and White House counsel, Vincent Foster, a murder victim in the fevered imaginings of some haters. Indeed, Clinton recalls that Republican congressman Dan Burton once went so far as to riddle a watermelon in his back yard with bullets in an attempt to prove — well, what, exactly? Lives were ruined; Clinton dwells at length on the fate of his friend and former business partner Susan McDougal, imprisoned for months because of her refusal to tell the lies that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr wanted to hear.

Ever self-pitying, Clinton claims that he fell into Monica Lewinsky’s embrace in reaction to the pressure he’d been put under by Starr, and he offers this psychobabble as yet another instance of the "double life" he’d been leading from the time he was an abused child. I’m not buying it. Far more important, and convincing, is Clinton’s larger point: that a politically motivated prosecutor was allowed nearly to bring down the president because Clinton was less than forthcoming about blowjobs. And Clinton correctly observes that the media went along for almost the entire ride, disembarking only after the pornographic Starr Report revealed its author to be a sex-crazed, out-of-control, power-hungry tool of the extreme right.

Why did the media enable Starr and Clinton’s other right-wing critics rather than reveal them for what they were? Clinton quotes former Republican senator Alan Simpson, of Wyoming, to revealing effect, writing, "Simpson laughed at how willing the ‘elitist’ press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: ‘You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important.’ When I asked him to explain, he said, ‘Democrats like you ... get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.’"

CLINTON’S SECTIONS on his negotiations with the Israelis and the Palestinians are heartbreaking. From the hopefulness embodied in that handshake between Rabin and Arafat, Clinton documents a long deterioration. After Rabin’s assassination, Clinton tried to bring Benjamin Netanyahu and Arafat together, and succeeded for a time. Later, as we all know, he worked to broker a final settlement between Arafat and Ehud Barak. They came so close. By Clinton’s telling, in the weeks before his presidency would end, Israel was willing to give the Palestinians 97 percent of the West Bank and substantial control over large swaths of Jerusalem. But Arafat still said no.

"Right before I left office," Clinton writes, "Arafat, in one of our last conversations, thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.’" Arafat, though, was right. Clinton was and is a force of nature, someone who can stay up later, talk longer, and just plain keep at it more persistently than anyone else in the room. The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were an opportunity for him to bring together all his considerable strengths — his mastery of detail, his desire to ingratiate and flatter, his innate understanding of how far an adversary or an ally can or should go, his burning need to leave a positive legacy after the stain of impeachment, no matter how undeserved. If Arafat had simply said "yes," Clinton would have a genuine claim to presidential greatness. As it stands, it’s just another example of how his enormous potential remained somehow unfulfilled.

Clinton’s efforts to bring peace to these ancient combatants would have made for a fine book. Unfortunately, there are many books inside My Life, scattered, undeveloped fragments that occasionally entice, often bore, and always frustrate.

Late last month, when Larry King asked Clinton whether he intended to write another book, he replied, "Oh, I might write another one. I might write several more."

As one of our youngest ex-presidents, Clinton has plenty of time to get it right. But he’s sure off to a lousy start. The ’90s were many things, but they were never this dull.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his daily "Media Log" at BostonPhoenix.com.