Book Review: Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley (2007)

The paperback cover of Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, 2007. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Christopher Buckley’s 2007 novel Boomsday tackles the subject of Social Security. Not perhaps the most obvious subject for political satire, but Boomsday is fun and effective, nevertheless. The main character is Cassandra Devine, a young woman who works for a public relations firm and also runs a blog that is concerned with Social Security spending. The full acronym of her blog is Concerned Americans for Social Security Amendment Now, Debt Reduction and Accountability. 

When Cassandra incites young people to rise up against the senior citizens that are crippling their future with debt, riots break out. Golf courses in gated communities are ripped up, and Cassandra is investigated by the FBI and arrested. Cassandra eventually comes up with a bold new proposal to solve the Social Security solvency crisis: tax benefits for old people who commit suicide in order to lessen the population of elders receiving Social Security. This proposal is eventually called “transitioning,” and Buckley’s black humor shines as he describes the public relations spin on the proposal.  

Boomsday is packed with other characters ripe for satire: Gideon Payne, the holier-than-thou leader of the Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule, or SPERM for short, Randolph K. Jepperson IV, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts who decided to enter politics after a painting of JFK spoke to him while he was on an LSD trip, and Cassandra’s father Frank Cohane, who spent all of Cassandra’s college fund, but eventually struck it rich with a technology start-up.  

The panoply of characters that Buckley populates his novel with reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s writings, and like Wolfe, Buckley puts his characters through their paces during the course of the novel. There are numerous funny lines and scenes throughout Boomsday. Here’s an assortment of my favorites.  

Cassandra’s mother despairs when Cassandra starts reading The Fountainhead: “I had a boyfriend in high school who read Atlas Shrugged. He ended up handing out leaflets on street corners about how we all have to watch out for number one. It’s an unpleasant philosophy.” (p.50) This is even funnier if you know that William F. Buckley panned Atlas Shrugged in the pages of National Review, and Ayn Rand threw a fit.  

“In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream.” (p.172) 

“Why had he remarried? What possessed him? If he’d only waited a little longer, his dick would no longer have been in charge.” (p.187)  

“His brain was like a mastodon struggling to free itself of a tar pit.” (p.227) 

“She found herself wishing that she had lived before the age of the Internet and cable TV, when news arrived twice a day instead of every fricking second.” (p.279) 

“When she and Terry did their preliminary reconnaissance, he had taken one look at the depiction of FDR, with opaque bronze eyeglasses, upturned hat, and sitting on his almost invisible wheelchair, and said, ‘He looks like that Irish writer, James Joyce, sitting on a toilet.’” (p.312) Devoted fans of Christopher Buckley will recall this line from his very funny book about walking around Washington, D.C., Washington Schlepped Here. Having seen the sculpture in question at the FDR Memorial in person, I’m inclined to agree with Buckley.  

If the above quotes tickled your funny bone, you should pick up a copy of Boomsday.  

Book Review: Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970)

The cover of Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970.

She read the book quickly. It did not seem to matter much how the sentences were arranged, or whatever exactly the sentences said, because they all seemed very long and emotionless and the kind of sentences you could read for a very long time without really absorbing much of anything. The main character was an actress, but she didn’t seem to do much acting, and her agent was trying to get her to take more acting jobs so she wouldn’t be so depressed, and finally she did take this one acting job on a TV show, and that was the only time during the whole novel that she actually did some acting, but it was clear she didn’t like doing the TV show. The character was really depressed and isolated and bored, and that seemed to be the whole vibe the book was giving, depression and boredom. Ennui, that was it. Everything sounds better in French. Maybe instead of saying we’re depressed we should just start saying we have ennui, which made her think of Alain Delon lying around the swimming pool in La Piscine, and she thought of how gorgeous Romy Schneider was in La Piscine, and how if Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had a baby together it would have been so beautiful but they didn’t have a baby together and after Romy Schneider died so young Alain Delon never watched La Piscine again because it made him too sad, and that sounded very romantic and very French to her, to deprive yourself of a beautiful movie because it made you too sad and she thought of Alain Delon’s beautiful blue eyes filling with tears and that made her very sad.  

The one thing the actress liked doing was driving her car on the freeways, and that did seem like it would be pretty cool. She imagined if she had an old Corvette like this actress had and like Joan Didion had, you know, the kind with the long sexy hood and a T-top roof, but those old cars probably got really terrible gas mileage, and they probably weren’t good for the environment with their powerful, gas-guzzling, sexy V-8 engines that put out 300 horsepower. But they must have been fun to drive. She had never owned a car with 300 horsepower.  

She understood some of the reasons why the actress in this book was so depressed, because literally everything in her life was really terrible and awful. The actress was getting a divorce, and her husband seemed self-absorbed and egotistical, and there were probably a lot of men like that in Hollywood in those days, and the actress had this gay friend that she hung out with a lot, but he wasn’t like a fun gay best friend, he seemed like a drag as well, and he had a lot of money and his mother paid him money to be married to a woman, and that didn’t seem like too bad of a deal, really, because he was still doing whatever he wanted to and his wife didn’t really seem to care very much and he bought her expensive jewelry and she seemed pretty okay with this weird kind of bargain they had made.  

The one time this actress actually seemed to enjoy something, besides driving her car on the freeway, was when she went to the Hoover Dam. The actress wanted to lie down on the main water pipe in Hoover Dam, and as she read the book she wondered if there was something sexual about the Hoover Dam for the actress. Also, as she read this part about the Hoover Dam, she thought about how Joan Didion wrote about the Hoover Dam in her book The White Album. Joan Didion wrote: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize...” (The White Album, p.198) And that sounded kind of weird and nutty to her. The Hoover Dam was just a big, giant slab of concrete, it sounded much more fun to have a yellow Corvette in your dreams.  

And this actress had an abortion, and that part of the novel was really, truly, awful and she thought of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and she remembered reading that in high school and how the questions in the short story book told you that it was actually about an abortion, and she couldn’t quite remember if she had realized when she was reading it that it was about an abortion and she remembered reading “Hills Like White Elephants” again in an American Literature class in college, and she remembered asking the other students if they knew that it was about an abortion and it was her little dig at Hemingway because sometimes he was spare and close to the bone and beautiful and other times he was just abstruse and she wondered if it was hard for Hemingway to say what he actually meant and she thought how she liked F. Scott Fitzgerald better because he could write those beautiful gorgeous sentences that would just stop you in your tracks because they were so beautifully crafted and perfect.  

She didn’t know how many stars she should give this book. She could really justify any number from 1 to 5. One star because all of the people in it were really pretty awful and there wasn’t really anybody to sympathize with, although she did kind of sympathize with the actress because everything was so awful for her, but it was more like a kind of pity for the actress and you never really got to know any of the characters well enough to feel much emotion for them, but maybe that was the whole point of the book but then why go to all the trouble to write a whole book about these people if you weren’t really supposed to feel any emotion for them? Five stars because the book did what it was probably supposed to do, which was make you feel pretty awful and rotten and be glad you weren’t as depressed as this actress was, so it was effective in doing that, and other people had thought this book was good too, and that was part of the reason she had read the book was because other people said how good it was. She had read the book really quickly, over just two days, so that was good, but she hadn’t really enjoyed reading the book, although she figured that was part of the point, that the book wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. She finally settled on three stars. 

Book Review: Tahoe Deathfall, an Owen McKenna mystery by Todd Borg (2001)

A display of Todd Borg's Owen McKenna mystery novels. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. Situated on the California/Nevada border, Lake Tahoe offers fantastic summer and winter activities. My uncle lived in South Lake Tahoe for more than 30 years. He passed away in March, at the age of 92. Last week we had a celebration of life service for my uncle. On that trip, I found Todd Borg’s series of mystery novels set in and around Lake Tahoe. I don’t often read mysteries or thrillers, but I decided to pick up Tahoe Deathfall, the first book in Borg’s series of novels featuring the private detective Owen McKenna.  

Tahoe Deathfall opens with 14-year-old Jennifer Salazar wanting to hire Owen to look into the death of her twin sister Melissa. When Jennifer and Melissa were six years old, Melissa fell off a cliff while hiking. Jennifer always felt that Melissa’s death was more than just an accident. Owen starts investigating the case, and of course there are more layers to unravel.  

Owen McKenna is a fun and engaging lead character. One of the things I enjoyed most about Owen is that he is an appreciator of art. He has a poster of Edward Hopper’s New York Movie in his office, and his ruminations about art are fun to read.  

It’s always fun to read about places that you know very well, and I enjoyed reading about Emerald Bay and Zephyr Cove and thinking to myself, “Hey, I’ve been there!” It’s the little things. If you’re unfamiliar with Lake Tahoe, there’s a helpful map at the beginning of the book. 

Owen is aided in his investigation by his harlequin Great Dane Spot, and his girlfriend Street, who is a forensic entomologist. They make a fun team, and Owen and Street have a fun relationship.   

I was looking at Todd Borg’s website, and I learned that he grew up in Minnesota, my home state, so it’s fun that I have two places in common with him. If you’re looking for an engaging mystery series, pick one of Todd Borg’s Tahoe series.