They Eat Puppies, Don't They? [Hardcover]

After reviewing the last few Christopher Buckley novels, I'm not sure how many new ways I can come up with saying, "Oh my gosh, this guy is funny!" I started laughing while reading the list of players at the front of the novel. ("Winnie Chang, chair, U.S.-China Co-Dependency Council") I chuckled over the novel's opening sentence. ("The senator from the great state of New York had been droning on for over five minutes, droning about drones.") I think part of my appreciation of Buckley's satire is that I'm a native Washingtonian. Buckley gets DC, the way that Armisted Maupin gets San Francisco--but, like the city he writes about, without all the heart.

In They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, Mr. Buckley is returning to several themes we've seen before. He goes after some of the same targets, too: politicians, the media, Hollywood, reality television, pundits, trophy wives, the uninformed populace, and--of course--novelists. Who can blame him? They all make such inviting targets!

The protagonist at the heart of this novel feels familiar, as well. Lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre shares some of the same DNA as the delightfully unrepentant Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking. Both men have an unpopular job to do, and they take pride in their work. Bird is a defense lobbyist. After Congress shoots down his employer's latest big budget defense project in the novel's opening scene, he fears for his job. Fortunately, his employer has something even bigger, more deadly, and more top-secret up his sleeve. It's so top-secret that he won't even tell Bird. Instead, he sets Bird up in a shill foundation called Pan-Pacific Solutions, where he is tasked with rustling up some anti-China sentiment to grease the wheels for this next project's appropriations.

To accomplish this task, Bird teams up with the mediagenic Angel Templeton, the Coulter-esque hottie from the Institute for Continuing Conflict. Bird pitches her:

"Friday I stayed up until the roosters started, doing research. The Dalai Lama is the one thing having to do with China that Americans actually care about. Human rights? Zzzzz. Terrible working conditions in Chinese factories? Zzzzz. Where's my iPad? Global warming? Zzzzzz. Taiwan? Wasn't that some novel by James Clavell? Zzzzzz. When's the last time you heard anyone say, `We really must go to war with China over Taiwan'? But the Dalai Lama? Americans LOVE that guy. The whole world loves him. What's not to love? He's a seventy-five-year-old sweetie pie with glasses, plus the sandals and the saffron robe and the hugging and the mandalas and the peace and harmony and the reincarnation and nirvana. All that. We can't get enough of him. If the American public were told that those rotten Commie swines in Beijing were"--Bird lowered his voice--"putting... whatever, arsenic, radioactive pellets, in his yak butter, you don't think that would cause a little firestorm out there in public-opinion land?"

And they're off to the races! Buckley's tale is the perfect intersection of absurd and smart. It's outlandish and uproarious. It's just crazy enough to be true. It's obvious that Buckley has a great grasp of the issues in order to be so effective in skewering all of the players. They Eat Puppies, Don't They? reads like a novel-length Doonesbury strip, and I laughed long and loud all the way through it. Some of Mr. Buckley's recent novels have felt a bit like "Buckley light." Not this one. This is the real deal. It's smart, it's funny, and it's biting. This may be his best satire in years.

If you liked Thank You for Smoking, you'll like the first third of this book. But after that it falls a bit flat. The characters never really gel, and the situations don't come to much of a resolution. In fact, there are so many promising hints that go nowhere that I wonder if the Kindle edition is missing some content.

Christopher Buckley is one of the great humorous novelists of his generation -- that would be the Boomers, for anyone keeping score -- though he's only good for a novel every few years; THEY EAT PUPPIES, DON'T THEY? is only his ninth novel since The White House Mess in 1986. But, like all great humorists, he has his blind spots -- in particular, Buckley has struggled with writing believable female characters, particularly viewpoint characters. His novels are all about politics, which he sees through a subtly right-wing lens. And, except for his best novel, Thank You for Smoking, he's been hesitant to go for the jugular, the way the writer of satirical novels about the US government should, so his books often land softly rather than stabbing into the ground as they might.

Still, he's both authentically funny and well-grounded in actual Washington power politics: even if he does pull his punches some of the time, he knows where to land them so they still do some damage. His books are usually vaguely timely -- Boomsday was about the looming Boomer retirement wave, and what that will mean for the generation struggling to pay for their benefits, while Supreme Courtship anticipated the hearings over Justice Sotomayor in its own twisted way -- but focused on the big picture rather than specific events [1]. And so THEY EAT PUPPIES is his China novel.

Buckley's heroes tend to be thinly drawn nice guys in nasty jobs, and THEY EAT PUPPIES's "Bird" McIntyre is another in that line: he's a lobbyist for a defense contractor (shades of THANK YOU), but the plot of the book follows him setting up a shell foundation (shades of Super PACs) to influence Congress and public opinion in a way which will benefit the big contractor that has supposedly just removed itself from his services. Bird's new foundation is primarily devoted to ginning up outrage about China -- for reasons Bird himself doesn't know -- and so he gets caught up in the web of THEY EAT PUPPIES's other main character, Angel Templeton. Angel is a fever dream version of Ann Coulter, as powerful and connected as Democrats fear she is and as sexually and personally compelling as Republicans are sure she is, running her own organization which Buckley pretty much bluntly says wants to start any war it possibly can, anywhere. (Buckley is some variety of conservative, but it's clear he's no Boltonesque neocon.)

Bird and Angel luck into a health scare of the Dalai Lama -- everyone loves inoffensive aged spiritual figures -- and work that up into a full-fledged media attack on China, starting with a vaguely plausible rumor that the Chinese are trying to assassinate the Lama and working up from there. Wacky hijinks ensue, as they must -- Bird is supposedly a master of spin, though he spends the entire book off-balance, either because of Angel or because of his high-maintenance horsey wife Myndi, which unfortunately makes him one of Buckley's more ineffectual heroes. Things happen to Bird, as they usually do in a Buckley novel, but he never drives the plot forward; he's just the guy bobbing to the top of the stream. I'm sorry to say that Bird is also a would-be technothriller novelist, and that Buckley gives us several examples of his deathless prose -- it's as awful as we expect, but not as funny as I think Buckley intended.

Buckley is best when his scenes jump around the world at high speed, when he moves from the Chinese President's insomnia to the travails of the unnamed US President's national security advisor. Even Angel -- who is unrealistic as a real person, but a fabulous creation for a satirical novel -- is more interesting than supposedly relatable sad sack Bird. Buckley could have a really great, utterly cutting novel -- or more than one -- in him, but he needs to let go of heroes to set that novel free: his characters are much more engaging when he's not trying to make us like them, and his worlds work better the more of those self-obsessed workaholic borderline lunatics we run into.

THEY EAT PUPPIES has another soft landing -- reminiscent of Little Green Men -- as Bird is battered by the outside world and simultaneously comes to a personal epiphany. That last is a shame; Buckley's worlds are so jaundiced and mean-spirited that being nice in one of them is a major failing -- it would be much better if Bird were to benefit hugely from all of his manipulations and be sucked even deeper into the bleak world of the defense contractor. This is certainly a funny and knowing novel of politics and international strife, entirely entertaining as it goes. But the reader can also see in it the outlines of an even funnier, tougher novel that Buckley could have written, which puts the slightest of dampers on the fun.

[1] It's telling that not one of Buckley's novels takes place during an election year; they're all about people in office rather than fighting for it.