Heck Of A Guy

The Heck Of A Guy 2007 Summer Read

Christopher Buckley has packed his latest novel, Boomsday, brimful with all manner of fun:

• An absurd, eminently believable plot (AKA a typical Christopher Buckley plot)
• A protagonist who is not only smart, independent, and female, but also a blogger
• A fast moving, action-satiated plot with lots-o-laughs
• Fiscal policy
• Chortle-inducing, pun-enhanced organizational acronyms, such as
     SPERM: Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule
     ABBA: Association of Baby Boomer Advocates
     BADMAP: Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor
• Sex
• Focus groups
• A $700 an hour lawyer whose client persists in telling the truth, thus negating his value
• A successful $15 million class-action suit against the Salvation Army for dispensing sugar doughnuts to a a few diabetic disaster victims
• A Bosnian battle scene with an explosive conclusion
• Mobs of U30s (Under 30s) attacking golf courses in Boomer retirement communities
• Fraudulent nursing-home schemes
• A proposed pro-am golf tournament - on a course built with slave labor in North Korea
• Presidential campaign slogans that are - uh, unconventional, including
     “No Worse Than The Others”
     “You Know Where To Find Me”
     “Shut The Fuck Up”
• A patrician senator with a prosthetic leg and Tourette’s, who aspires to be president
• A southern fundamentalist preacher suspected of matricide, who aspires to be president
• A Silicon Valley tycoon blackmailing the president to become Secretary of the Treasury
• The tycoon’s obligatory trophy wife
• A Russian prostitution ring shaking down a prelate on the short list of Papal candidates
• Wisdom about love: “Once you’ve slept with a woman, it’s harder to lie to her, despite the necessity.”

It’s easy to see why Boomsday is the official 2007 Heck of a Guy Summer Read; what’s not to like?

Thank You For Transitioning

The titular “Boomsday” is a play on the “Baby Boomers” generation and “Doomsday,”¹ referencing the impending Malthusian economic crisis that will be triggered when the Boomers retire because of the resulting exponential increase in total Social Security and Medicare benefits paid to these now officially elderly Boomers paired with a similarly dramatic decrease in the number of employees paying into those systems.

Propelled in equal parts by her disgust over the government’s failure to address the issues and by her nearly continuous ingestion of Red Bull, Cass, the heroic blogger by night and PR maven by day, creates a contemporary, not quite Swiftian, modest proposal: Voluntary Transitioning. Voluntary Transitioning is her euphemism for elderly Boomers, in return for certain incentives (e.g., elimination of ones estate tax, free Botox treatments), agreeing to voluntary suicide at a given age, thus alleviating the fiscal crunch.

Initially designed as a “no way it will actually become law” idea to force Congress to consider the underlying problem, the proposal is used to garner political advantage by various players, gaining traction to the point that its enactment becomes a serious possibility, and, as one might guess, hilarity ensues.

While the forthcoming demographically induced economic apocalypse is the primary focus of Buckley’s satirical attack, it is not the only target. This excerpt, for example, resonates with the concerns of certain Boomers like me:

Buckley sets the stage for this spectacle by constructing what one of his characters calls, an “asshole-rich environment” - the Washington of public relation firms, lobbyists, politicos, press agents, political consultants, spin doctors, bureaucrats, and the other such dangerous denizens that was the home base of his first and most wondrous novel, Thank You For Smoking. Indeed, a particularly instructive joy of reading Boomsday is chance to view the workings of the many promotions, campaigns, and manipulation of public opinion.

None Of The Characters Are Sympathetic - But Who Cares?

All of the characters, including the brilliant, plucky, and inevitably sexy Cass, are self-serving, sneaky, and manipulative - if they aren’t downright maliciously evil.

Boomsday, in fact, falls short of Thank You For Smoking because that first novel was driven by the personality of Nick Naylor, the ace lobbyist for the tobacco industry, the central character, and, most importantly, a guy the reader cared about.²

One should note, however, that it is Thank You For Smoking that is the aberration in this genre, not Boomsday. Satire requires no sympathetic characters, and it could be legitimately argued that such personages actually impede and distract from the message.

If one can’t have everything - and apparently one can’t - choices must be made. One may realize, for example, that, as Rupert Holmes eruditely declares in Escape (The Pina Colada Song),

I am not into health food
I am into champagne

One drinks champagne because it’s fun to drink champagne, not for its health benefit. Similarly, one reads satire because of it’s fun to find the message piquantly portrayed, not for profound insights into the human condition.

Hammering Those Subtleties

While I’m a unabashed, unreformed, unrepentant Christopher Buckley fan, he does have one teensy-weensy little habit that occasionally causes me a tad of annoyance - which I’ve thus far healthily sublimated into developing detailed, explicit, and illustrated plans for a prolonged and particularly painful interrogation, with methodologies based on the Spanish Inquisition, of the author about this trait in hopes of saving his wretched soul from damnation.

Mr. Buckley, it seems, is risk-abhorrent, appalled by the possibility that someone, somewhere, sometime might miss one of his jokes, overlook an allusion, or misunderstand one of his references. Consequently, no mythological reference is left unexplained, no allegory unexamined, no pun unexplicated, and certainly no cleverness of any sort unrepeated.

To provide the prospective reader a sense of this experience, I’ve translated a portion of the implicit between-the-lines authorial meta-monologue into prose, most effectively read with a maternalistic intonation:

Cover to Cover Coverage - A Heck Of A Guy Exclusive

While a few articles mention the “pop-art” cover design, I find only one other review that discusses it further and even that review lacks illustrations. And, that one also gets the image wrong - I think (see below).

Not only is the cover brightly colored with alternating yellow and blue rays running from the center to the periphery but the central graphic, a red, scalloped ellipse with the words, “Boomsday” and “A Novel,” is actually printed on the first page, not on the cover. That composite image is viewed through an opening in the cover page.

These stripes are elsewhere described as “sun-rays” and the central image is called “a red cloud.” Perhaps these terms were only meant as verbal illustrations, but it seems rather straightforward that the design emulates an explosion - as in BOOM, as in Boomsday.

The back cover continues the motif of radiating blue and yellow stripes, the latter of which are inscribed with typically effusive logrolling praise (e.g., “funniest” this, “quintessential” that) for the book and author.

[Click on graphic to view larger image]

It is, indeed, way out.

The Boomsday Decision

Sadly, a number of otherwise perfectly decent folks don’t enjoy Boomsday. Perhaps they don’t like champagne either. Maybe they don’t care for their children or love their mothers. It’s not for me to judge.

For the rest of us who are fortunate enough to enjoy a savaging satire sprinkled with sophomoric puns and hyper-ridiculous acronyms, it is a dandy book for summer.

As Juvenal noted, Difficile est satiram non scribere, It is difficult not to write satire. For Buckley, it’s darn near impossible.

Thank goodness.

Footnotes

1. Near the end of the book, there is a repeated allusion to James Joyce, which leads me to wonder if there is not also a connection between “Boomsday” and “Bloomsday,” the June 16th commemoration of Leopold Bloom’s activities as documented in Ulysses by James Joyce.↩
2. Buckley may agree. In most of his other fiction, he alludes to Thank You For Smoking - as he does in Boomsday, noting that the mentor learned his trade at the feet of the esteemed Nick Naylor.↩

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