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Author should be changed to Dr. Character Development and Mr. Pundit. Because Buckley goes along fine for awhile, writing a fairly interesting story about just-improbable-enough to be very, very interesting characters and then, whammo, Mr. Pundit takes over the book and it starts reading like an NRO blog post about the book.
Which is to say that Boomsday takes the kernel of an idea-- that the Baby Boomers are going to ruin everyone and everything by collapsing the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security and so Gen X (Y, M, whatevs) starts calling for their voluntary suicides-- and builds wonderful characters up around it. It reads like 275 pages of rip-roaring character sketches, each worthwhile enough to be a novel on its own. And the idea itself, that Boomers are the most incredibly selfish generation in history ruining it for everyone that comes after them, is legitimate although hyperbolic. Buckley seemed to weary of making the two work together though, so it reads like two novels written by two people. At one point a chapter even starts "two months later." Really?
This could really have been something. But it fizzled. And maybe that's thematically significant.
Which is to say that Boomsday takes the kernel of an idea-- that the Baby Boomers are going to ruin everyone and everything by collapsing the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security and so Gen X (Y, M, whatevs) starts calling for their voluntary suicides-- and builds wonderful characters up around it. It reads like 275 pages of rip-roaring character sketches, each worthwhile enough to be a novel on its own. And the idea itself, that Boomers are the most incredibly selfish generation in history ruining it for everyone that comes after them, is legitimate although hyperbolic. Buckley seemed to weary of making the two work together though, so it reads like two novels written by two people. At one point a chapter even starts "two months later." Really?
This could really have been something. But it fizzled. And maybe that's thematically significant.