Christopher Buckley, you witty guy, you don’t miss a trick! For starters, the name of your main character, Nick Naylor, tobacco advocate – that’s Nick as in nicotine and Naylor as in coffin nails, an apt and colorful term for cigarettes back in the heyday of smoking and lung cancer.
Thank You For Smoking is scathing social and political satire. Thank You For Smoking is belly laugh funny. Thank You For Smoking published in 1994, right around the time medical evidence demonstrated flight attendants working for the airlines were dropping like flies after breathing in all that second hand smoke on airplanes.
Today smokers in the US are relegated to designated smoking areas so they no longer jeopardize the health of non-smokers. But there were those many years when tobacco and smokers and smoking ruled the workplace and everywhere else in this county. And if someone dared claim cigarettes cause cancer, that person was labeled an anti-American crank and destroyer of freedom.
The timeframe of the novel is perfect. Right at the crossroads of the tobacco industry/smoking lobby having their way and all the legal restrictions enacted, things like no cigarette advertising on TV and radio, warning labels and designated smoking areas in restaurants and other public spaces.
But, in the spirit of asserting personal freedom, the rights of individuals and the American way of life as outlined by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Nick and his bunch are fighting to turn back the tide.
More than the string of events composing the story, the real humor comes through in Christopher Buckley’s timing and language. However, I’ll resist the temptation to simply lift quotes from the book (you will have to read for yourself). Rather, here are a number of snapshots featuring our super sharp Nick dealing with all he has to deal with in his capacity as chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies in Washington, D.C.:
THE MOD SQUAD
Nick has lunch once a week with Polly and Bobby Jay, his counterparts, respectively, for liquor and guns. They call themselves the Mod Squad after the 60s TV show, however, for them, MOD stands for “Merchants of Death.” All three take great pride in the challenges presented by their jobs. Sure, cigarettes and liquor and guns kill many thousands of people every day in the United States, but, hey, we’re living in the capitalist home of the free where the God given right to make a profit must be protected, even honored, no matter how high the death toll.
Christopher Buckley’s sharp, satirical needle digs deep here, recognizing the tragic consequences of the collective stance of these three young professionals. To add an extra helping of sizzle, Polly is a blonde bombshell for booze and Bobby Jay was inspired to join the National Guard after the Kent State shootings so he could shoot some college students for himself, but, alas, the army took him off to shoot some Vietnamese instead, but there was a problem – they shoot back.
THE BOSS
Nick’s boss is a guy going by the initials BR, a man as ruthless, callous, hard-nosed and sadistic as humanly possible. Through the magic of Christopher Buckley’s storytelling, with the inclusion of BR, we can completely empathize with Nick, even, in many respects, take his side.
Some may say that BR is a mere caricature, but such critics are entirely mistaken – BR is a completely developed character down to his thick-skinned toes. Anybody who has spent years working in the American business world knows from first-hand experience many, many bosses are cookie-cutter replicas of BR. And BR's redeeming personality traits are . . . er, ah . . . nonexistent.
THE TV TALK SHOWS
Nick does his slick, smooth-talking in debates with the opposition on Oprah and Larry King. Listening to Nick making his points by way of logical fallacies (topping the list are: Ad Hominem, Non-Testable Hypothesis, Begging the Question, Straw Man) is something to behold. Meanwhile, since the anti-smoking people on the air with Nick are unacquainted with logic (Americans, forever pragmatic, judge things like logic and philosophy as completely useless), they are reduced to flying into fits of rage. One of the more hilarious parts of the story.
THE BABES
Heather the lovely journalist and Jeannette the luscious, success driven femme fatale within the Academy of Tobacco Studies try to get their way with Nick. And their chief weapon? Of course – sex and more sex. Lucky guy! But wait, is he falling into a deadly trap?
THE KIDNAPPING AND ITS AFTERMATH
What really infuses serious drama into Christopher Buckley's tale is Nick being kidnapped and tortured (dozens of nicotine patches slapped on his body all at once). The way Nick and the Mod Squad ultimately swing into action to deal with this terrible injustice is a stroke of genius. I urge you to read all about it.
This is my first Christopher Buckley novel and it will not be my last. I was initially attracted to Mr. Buckley's writing through his insightful, humorous book reviews. As something of a bonus, here are a number of quotes from two of my all time favorite Christopher Buckley book reviews:
From his review of The End of the Age, a novel written by Pat Robertson, champion of conservative Christian ideology:
“It's hard to define The End of the Age exactly. It's sort of a cross between Seven Days in May and The Omen, as written by someone with the prose style of a Hallmark Cards copywriter.
“The bad guys tend to sound like the villains in a Charlie Chan movie. In fact, they sound as if they were being simultaneously translated from some sinister Indo-Iranian tongue.
"The End of the Age is to Dante what Sterno is to The Inferno. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss."
From his review of Tom Clancy’s novel, Debt of Honor:
“This book is as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies. . . . His Japanese aren't one-dimensional, they're half-dimensional. They spend most of their time grunting in bathhouses.
“And there is this hilarious description of Ryan's saintly wife saving someone's sight with laser surgery: "She lined up the crosshairs as carefully as a man taking down a Rocky Mountain sheep from half a mile, and thumbed the control." You've got to admire a man who can find the sheep-hunting metaphor in retinal surgery.
"Tom Clancy is the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say, the most successful bad writer of his generation. This is no mean feat, for there are many, many more rich bad writers today than there were in Cooper's time.”
American author Christopher Buckley, born 1952
"Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before." - Christopher Buckley
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