Thank You For Smoking

Before starting this, I had a bit of a reading lull, when I tried to reread James Thurber and then Thomas Mann. Neither attempt worked out well, and so I was left craving something modern. That is how I ended up picking up this Christopher Buckley novel.

And for the first half, this book was exactly what I needed. It was a funny satire full of interesting characters. And if Thomas Mann seemed at times completely inaccessible to me, this was the very opposite. In short, when Larry King, Katie Couric, and Oprah periodically become characters in a novel, that novel is officially modern -- and even at times dated, as in the case of the Donahue references. (It was written in 1994.)

I loved the concept of a novel about the unfortunate souls who have to defend tobacco in public. Nick Naylor, tobacco's chief spokesperson, is so talented and so good at being unethical that he ends up, almost accidentally, winning great press for Big Tobacco. He even meets regularly for lunch with fellow flacks for the gun and alcohol lobbies. That group calls itself the Mod Squad, short for Merchants of Death.

And Buckley has a lot of fun lampooning 1990s politics, as in this passage about flying between Los Angeles and Washington:

There was a lot of traffic back and forth between D.C. and L.A. these days. He recognized Barbra Steisand's issues persons, whom he'd read had flown in to brief the National Security Council on Barbra's position on the developing Syrian situation. Richard Dreyfuss' issues person was also on board, having given a presentation to the cabinet on Richard's feelings about health reform.

My problem is that I liked the setup more than the payoff. As the novel went along, it became more about the plot and less about the clever little moments of Washington politics. I confess that I'm not always into plot in my novels, though in this case it seems that Buckley suddenly realizes towards the end that he needs to push the story along. And in the last half, I'm not entirely sure that the plot meshes well with the satire.

But maybe I'm just whining. As that frisky German Thomas Mann might say, "It seems that a noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge." Whatever that means.