Reality Fiction
EMERY, NOEMIE
Reality Fiction Christopher Buckley's novel makes even Washington funny. BY NOEMIE EMERY A Washington novel by Christopher Buckley is cause for rejoicing. So are his non-fiction essays, of...
...He had planned, he says, to write a long expose that would be boring and serious...
...What if Bill Clinton had John McCain's resume, Hillary Clinton were nicer, and Barbra Streisand married Marc Rich...
...There is wall-to-wall media coverage, from the tabloid Perspirer to Hard Gavel, the court talk show with perennial lawyer-guest Alan Crudman...
...The same things are there, but shaken up different...
...Having laid waste to the executive branch of the government, Buckley moved on, in Thank You for Smoking, to the culture of K Street, especially to the lobbyists for the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries...
...She begins to regret it almost at once, as Ken starts to hit on her bridesmaids, while Boyce goes through four short, flameout marriages to models and Euro-trash...
...He is called a whore by his father, a killer at forums, and gets death threats when he appears on television...
...Naylor spends his days lying and taking abuse from the public...
...Call it Ishmael...
...But her affections were stolen by Ken ("War God") Mac-Mann, whose heroic past and chestful of medals quite staggered her gullible heart...
...Buckley came to Washington in 1981 to work as a speechwriter for George H.W...
...The best parts of these books are the ones that stay close to reality: Buckley's long riffs on the Larry King program, for instance, and Jeffrey Toobin's "reports" to Peter Jennings on ABC's World News Tonight...
...Beth dumps Boyce, with dire effects on the both of them...
...Nick Naylor, Boyce Baylor, where will it all end...
...But his newly coined bleak views about human nature make him a sure bet for absolute stardom in the carnivorous world of the law...
...Christopher Buckley has presented his city of faction in a series of novels and in Wry Martinis, a collection of essays...
...The first sign that Buckley had made this connection came in a parody in the New Yorker, in which Hillary Clinton hires Johnnie Cochran to represent her after her fingerprints— and O.J...
...Five years later he gave us his first take Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The fictional Tucker owed a great deal to the (almost) real President Carter, whom he tended to match in well-meaning clueless-ness...
...Call it hilarious...
...Along the way, old passions revive, and love is rekindled...
...Boyce taints the jury and is arrested (while on the Today show...
...A good soul at heart, Nick in the end turns in his employers, serves two years in a public facility, writes a bestseller, and marries a former flack for big alcohol...
...He defends, of course, Beth...
...And the best parts of that book are his portraits of Vernon Jordan, Pamela Harriman, and Ample Ampere, the fictional sponsor of a political talk show that markets the electric chair...
...on government success and excess with a mock memoir entitled The White House Mess, about the administration of Thomas N. Tucker, the Democratic governor of Idaho who succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989 and was defeated in a landslide four years later...
...In her dire straits, she turns to Boyce ("Shameless") Baylor, the world's greatest lawyer, the first one to charge $1,000 an hour and to be widely assumed to be worth it...
...Boyce proposes to Beth, and Beth accepts him...
...Some hours later, much the worse for wear, he staggers back into his bedroom, where First Lady Beth MacMann ("Lady Bethmac" to her many detractors) correctly guesses what he was up to and hurls an antique sterling-silver Paul Revere spittoon at his cranium...
...Back in 1972, Beth and Boyce had been students and sweethearts at Georgetown University's law school...
...Nick makes several appearances in Buckley's latest, No Way to Treat a First Lady, as the put-upon publicist to a Hollywood actress, a more voluptuous version of Bar-bra Streisand...
...Simpson's—are found on Whitewater documents...
...Instead, he wrote a wildly funny short novel about former reporter Nick Naylor, who loses his job when he mistakenly declares the president dead on live television and then has to sell his soul to the tobacco industry to pay the mortgage on his ex-wife's big house in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington...
...Life keeps on creating these wonderful targets...
...So are his non-fiction essays, of course—but then, his novels are much like his essays: not novels so much as tweaks on reality, which come out much more real than life...
...God Himself is beginning to think just like Christopher Buckley—in which case, may God help us all...
...I put it to you," Buckley has the lawyers ask, "if you came home and found your ex-wife thanking a man who had once appeared on the television show Studs for returning a pair of her mother's eyeglasses, wouldn't you go a little bit nuts...
...Nick explains the whole story on Larry King Live...
...Boyce takes three adjoining suites in the Jefferson Hotel for a nightly cost of $7,500, and makes use of "Jeeter" (the "Juror Real Time Response Evaluator") to record and tabulate the expressions and gestures of the jurors...
...He knows how different hosts conduct their talk programs, the accents and tropes of pundits, and the bestseller listings in the New York Times...
...Simpson trial, add the imagination of a veteran novelist, and you'll come up with something almost like Christopher Buckley's No Way to Treat a First Lady, which is almost as strange as some things that go on in real life...
...he defends liars and psychopaths...
...Buckley's Washington is just like itself, only more so...
...Call it "faction...
...After an incubation period of about seven years, we now have his new novel, the perfect storm of sex, scandal, lawyers, and politics, the mother of all celebrity trials, in which the celebrity defendant is the first lady, the celebrity lawyer is her onetime fiance and ex-lover, and the celebrity corpse is none other than the president himself...
...What might happen, one can almost hear Buckley thinking, if one of the objects allegedly flung by the first lady at her philandering husband actually did him some harm...
...Presidential scandals and celebrity trials were the news stories of the mid-1990s...
...Bush, the vice president...
...It is no accident that Buckley's weakest novel, Little Green Men, was also his book that kept least close to the real life of day-to-day Washington...
...She does not, it turns out, have a fool for a client—but find out the rest for yourself...
...The funniest thing about No Way to Treat a First Lady is how close it is to real life...
...The events being fairly routine in the family quarters, the first couple retire, but only one of them awakes in the morning...
...In short order, the arraignment of Beth MacMann for the assassination of her president-husband becomes the Trial of the Millennium (the millennium then being about two years old...
...By the dawn's early light, the commander in chief is assuming room temperature, his eyes staring, his mouth open, and the word "Revere" embossed in reverse on his forehead...
...He defends crooks and pond scum...
...As the story begins, President Kenneth MacMann, having hosted a dinner for Uruguay's president, makes his way down the hall to the Lincoln Bedroom, where Babette Van Anka, film star, singer, fund-raiser, and Middle East activist, is waiting to make yet another donation...
...He has perfect pitch for the tones of modern political culture, from the way bureaucrats think to the way lawyers argue...
...He is demoted to motels in Rosslyn and directs the defense from a distance, as Beth becomes her own courtroom lawyer...
...Take the Clinton impeachment debate, add the O.J...
...He makes the cover of Time, and millions of dollars...
...he even defends other lawyers...
...The novel included a Soviet move to take over Bermuda, a liberal aide with a yacht called The Compassion, and a film star first lady who left in mid-crisis to go off on location—all told in the voice of one Herbert Wadlough, the president's friend from his hometown of Boise, who sustains himself in crises on cups of hot water...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 8
