Book Review: They Eat Puppies, Don't They? by Christopher Buckley (2012)

They Eat Puppies, Don't They? by Christopher Buckley, 2012, on my Buckley bookshelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Christopher Buckley

There are no sacred cows for a satirist like Christopher Buckley. In his 2012 novel They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? Buckley even knocked off the poor old Dalai Lama, one of the most beloved spiritual leaders in the world. Well, beloved as long as you’re not Chinese, I suppose. They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? focuses on tensions between the United States and China. The main character is a defense lobbyist and “would-be novelist,” Walter “Bird” McIntyre. Bird’s latest assignment is working with Angel Templeton, director of the Institute for Continuing Conflict, to foment anti-Chinese sentiment. With the Dalai Lama currently in a hospital in Rome, Bird and Angel decide to plant the story that the Chinese attempted to poison him. As Bird says, “Who needs evidence when you’ve got the Internet?” (p.49) 

When the novel takes us to Beijing, and the tables of the Politburo Standing Committee, it turns out that there are hardline members of the Committee who would like nothing better than to see the Dalai Lama poisoned. The Chinese President is the mild-mannered consensus builder Fa Mengyao, whose nickname is “Cool Limpidity.” Throughout the novel we see how he handles the more militant members of the Committee, the minister of state security and the minister of national defense. 

Bird McIntyre is quite an entertaining protagonist, and while in the beginning Bird might seem reminiscent of lobbyist Nick Naylor from Buckley’s excellent novel Thank You for Smoking, I quickly started imagining the actor John Krasinski as Bird, and then I stopped comparing Bird to Nick Naylor. Bird is proud of the fact that he made Washington magazine’s list of “Washington’s Ten Least Despicable Lobbyists.” (p.27) Buckley saddles Bird with some humorous issues, as he owns a farm in Virginia where his wife Myndi is obsessively training to make the U.S. equestrian team. Bird also has a younger brother Bewks, who is a Confederate Civil War reenactor—even though Bird’s family is from the North. As Bird delicately asks Bewks, “Do you and the boys ever reflect on the fact that you’re fighting on the slavery side?” (p.40) 

Bird’s terrible novels that he writes on the side were one of my favorite parts of the book. It’s always fun to read a good writer writing deliberately bad prose, and Buckley more than delivers. Bird’s novels have amazing titles: The Armageddon Infiltration, The Armageddon Immolation and The Armageddon Exfiltration. “He banged away on novels full of manly men with names like Turk and Rufus, of terrible yet really cool weapons, of beautiful but deadly women with names like Tatiana and Jade, who could be neither trusted nor resisted. Heady stuff.” (p.10) Late in the novel, Bird asks himself, “Where did sentences like that come from? No, don’t ask. Keep going.” (p.252) I suspect that Bird’s novels are modeled after the techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy, with whom Buckley had a brief feud. (You can read more about that in Buckley’s 1997 collection Wry Martinis, which I reviewed here.) 

There are many great lines scattered throughout They Eat Puppies, one of my favorite was Fa saying, “Privacy? We’re Communists. Don’t you know we don’t believe in privacy?” (p.201) Another great exchange was Myndi criticizing Bird’s wardrobe choice: “These are people with taste.” Bird’s response: “No, darling, they’re people with money.” (p.117) 

Since the publication of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? in 2012, Buckley has published two comedic historical novels, The Relic Master and The Judge Hunter. In interviews, Buckley has spoken about wanting to continue in this historical vein, so it’s possible that They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? might be the last of his Washington D.C. satires. If so, Buckley seems to have picked the exact right moment to leave the Beltway behind, as the events that have transpired there for the last couple of years seem completely beyond satire.