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A review by monty_reads
Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley
4.0
When it comes to naming our best contemporary satirists, the default response usually (and accurately) settles on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The Onion, too, and certainly anything Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It; In the Loop; Veep) creates. But I never hear Christopher Buckley's name mentioned, which is a shame. He's made a career out of skewering various American power structures – the stock market, the justice system, the State Department, etc. – and I'm glad that I finally got around to reading Thank You for Smoking,, which has to be his best work to date.
Here, Buckley sets himself the herculean task of turning Nick Naylor, the tobacco industry's chief spokesman, into a sympathetic character. No easy feat when Naylor regularly appears on Oprah and Larry King Live to tout the health benefits of smoking and then follows it up by meeting his counterparts in the alcohol and firearms lobbies for dinner – an unofficial social club which they've named "The Mod Squad" (short for Merchants of Death).
But somehow Buckley manages to make Naylor a character worth rooting for. He accomplishes part of this by making Naylor smart and funny and sort of "aw, shucks" about his own duplicity – a genial fellow who can't help but make up statistics about how nicotine slows the onset of Parkinson's. But the bigger part is that he makes Naylor a victim – first of his boss (who's an even bigger asshole than Nick), then of a kidnapper, then of the FBI who suspect Nick in his own abduction. Because Nick seems like such a decent guy, who can't help but feel sorry for all the stuff he's going through, even while he's paying off a celebrity lung cancer victim to stop speaking out against the tobacco industry (a thinly-veiled Marlboro Man, who actually did die of lung cancer in 1992).
The whole thing is pitch-black and very, very funny. Take this advice, which Nick gives his 12-year-old son:
'"The important thing is...is to feel tired at the end of the day.' Aristotle might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a good tired."
If acidic commentary is your thing and you don't know Buckley's work, start here and don't look back.
Here, Buckley sets himself the herculean task of turning Nick Naylor, the tobacco industry's chief spokesman, into a sympathetic character. No easy feat when Naylor regularly appears on Oprah and Larry King Live to tout the health benefits of smoking and then follows it up by meeting his counterparts in the alcohol and firearms lobbies for dinner – an unofficial social club which they've named "The Mod Squad" (short for Merchants of Death).
But somehow Buckley manages to make Naylor a character worth rooting for. He accomplishes part of this by making Naylor smart and funny and sort of "aw, shucks" about his own duplicity – a genial fellow who can't help but make up statistics about how nicotine slows the onset of Parkinson's. But the bigger part is that he makes Naylor a victim – first of his boss (who's an even bigger asshole than Nick), then of a kidnapper, then of the FBI who suspect Nick in his own abduction. Because Nick seems like such a decent guy, who can't help but feel sorry for all the stuff he's going through, even while he's paying off a celebrity lung cancer victim to stop speaking out against the tobacco industry (a thinly-veiled Marlboro Man, who actually did die of lung cancer in 1992).
The whole thing is pitch-black and very, very funny. Take this advice, which Nick gives his 12-year-old son:
'"The important thing is...is to feel tired at the end of the day.' Aristotle might not have constructed an entire philosophy on it, but it would do. True, Hitler and Stalin had probably felt tired at the end of their days. But theirs would not have been a good tired."
If acidic commentary is your thing and you don't know Buckley's work, start here and don't look back.