Authors: Christopher Buckley
I noodled around and suggested
Homage to Tom Clancy.
I liked it. It had a certain
je ne sais quoi
, and there was the chance that five billion Clancy fans might mistake it for the real thing and make me accidentally rich. The background is that I got into a little pissing match with Mr. Clancy after I reviewed one of his books for
The New York Times.
I called him a racist and the most successful bad writer in American since James Fenimore Cooper. The comment was itself an homage to Mark Twain, whose essay “The Literary Crimes of Fenimore Cooper” is still the most hilarious literary evisceration in American letters. Oddly, Mr. Clancy didn’t like being called a racist and a bad writer, and my fax machine began humming with incoming missives from him. These were leaked to the press (not—promise—by me). Our pissy fit became gossip page grist for a few days. But in the end Karp and I decided it was a bit of an inside joke and, anyway, did it make economic sense to annoy five billion Tom Clancy readers?
I suggested
Dual Airbags.
At first Karp did not click, being a New Yorker whose only experience with automobiles is riding in the backseat
of taxis driven by people with names like Ibrahim Abouhalima (which in Arabic means “America will pay dearly for its support of Israel!”). So I explained that since these days, dual airbags are such a big selling point for car buyers, why shouldn’t the concept appeal to book buyers as well? There was, too, the rather nifty, self-deprecating double entendre implying that the author is not just a gasbag, but a
real
gasbag. He liked that, and we would have used it, except everyone else hated it.
Then I came back with a title that I quite liked:
Should I Have Heard of You?
It’s taken from a typical airplane conversation:
P
ERSON NEXT TO ME
: And what do you do?
M
E
: I’m a writer.
P
ERSON
(
Perking up
): Oh? What’s your name?
M
E
: Chris Buckley.
P
ERSON
(
Frowning
): Should I have heard of you?
M
E
(
Bravely
): Not really.
P
ERSON
: If you’re a writer, then you must know John Grisham.
M
E
(
Seizing the moment
): Who?
P
ERSON
(
After fifteen minutes spent recapitulating the plot to each entry in the Grisham oeuvre
): I have all his books. Hardcover and paperback. I also have them all in audiocassette. I buy his books
before
they come out.
M
E
(
Pretending to be absorbed in an article called “What’s New in Newark?” in the in-flight magazine):
Well, if you like that sort of thing.
P
ERSON
: Do you know, he’s got fifty million books in print.
M
E
: Of course, the real test is, Will you still be in print a hundred years from now? That’s more what I’m aiming for. But I’ll certainly give this fellow Grashman a try, on your recommendation.
Fans of
One-upmanship
will recognize that exchange for what it is: Homage to Stephen Potter (1900—1965). It is, of course, completely disingenuous on my part. I know all about John Grisham and his fifty million books in print, and I hate him. He probably also has a wonderful sex life, too, damn him. At any rate,
Should I Have Heard of You?
was rejected as too precious.
By now I was getting sullen and resentful, which, being an only child, I frequently tend to get. “Give me my own way exactly in everything,”
said Thomas Carlyle, “and a sunnier, more pleasant creature does not exist.” When I read that quote to my wife, she laughed, bitterly.
Karp manfully suggested that he give the title a go on his own. A few days went by and my fax machine disgorged his suggestion:
The Ten Commandments.
Catchy as it was, I demurred. Let me say for the record: Jon Karp is an excellent editor, smart, funny, eager, hardworking, generous, returns-your-phone-calls, serious. (The man spends his summer vacations in the library at Brown University, rereading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I am not kidding.) And now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me say that
The Ten Commandments
is, arguably, THE WORST BOOK TITLE SINCE
Trimalchio in East Egg.
It crossed my mind that it might part of a sinister promotional plan by Random House to turn me into an American version of Salman Rushdie. Publishers strive to get their books turned into news stories.
AUTHOR IN HIDING AMIDST
CONTROVERSY OVER BOOK
There’s nothing resembling blasphemy in here. There is a piece about the Pope going on Oprah to promote his book, but it’s hardly worth an excommunication. There’s also a piece about being an agnostic dad, running my own private Sunday school so my seven-year-old daughter will grow up with the kind of firm grounding in Judeo-Christian tradition that enables you to slam the door in the faces of pesky Jehovah’s Witnesses. That
did
get a response, but not quite what I was hoping for. It ran in a Sunday newspaper supplement with a combined circulation of forty million. For one bright, shining moment I had almost as many readers as John Grisham. And they hated me. For months I was deluged with prayer books, Bibles, and letters telling me that unless I repented, I was going to burn in hell for all eternity. I did think it a bit harsh, considering the piece was about trying to raise your kids to know who Moses and Jesus were. In any event, we were still stuck for a title.
We came up with
FedExLax and Other Mergers.
It’s a title that needs explaining, and quickly. It’s from a Headlines of the Coming Year thing I did for
The New Yorker.
My wife told me she would divorce me if I called it that. And it did occur to me that my parents might not appreciate being the dedicatees of a book named after a famous laxative. Karp loved it, but then he has a very crude and unsophisticated sense of humor. This is why we work so well together. But back to square one.
Bassholes.
This too requires some explanation. It’s from a
New Yorker
piece in the book, a parody of brief reviews of new books on fly-fishing. One of the books is titled
Bassholes
, a vituperative attack on bass fishermen and -women by a fly-fishing purist professor at the University of Vermont. After it came out,
The New Yorker
got a lot of frustrated phone calls and letters from people who couldn’t find the books in stores. One person actually called up the University of Vermont to track down the author of
Bassholes
, and was annoyed to learn that there was no one on the faculty by that name. I wrote them all to explain. I sort of wanted to tell them, “Do you
really
think that Peter Benchley has written a book called
Gills
about a vengeful Dolly Varden trout?” (Having recently caught ten minutes of the TV movie of his book
The Beast
, I’m willing to admit
Gills
is not so far-fetched.) But I took their confusion as a kind of compliment, as I did when the press rose to my Lenin fly. Effective satire doesn’t show stretch marks.
On the other hand, it’s presumptuous to take credit for living in a world in which pretty much anything is plausible. What
would
surprise you to see on TV? The chief executive officers of the Big Seven American tobacco companies, testifying under oath before the Congress, “I do not believe nicotine is addictive”? Would you believe me if I said that the head of that same congressional committee was replaced a year later by a tobacco-friendly congressman from Richmond, Virginia, who, before he went to Washington, was a mortician? I wrote a comic novel about the tobacco lobby, and I wouldn’t have
dared
go that far. But a few days ago, O. J. Simpson said that he never beat up Nicole. No, no.
She
was trying to beat up
him.
See? Those bruises she had in the photographs were makeup. It would take a satirist with balls of stone to come up with that.
On the back page of
FYI
we run a feature called “The Bull Board,” a gathering of recent news clippings, a first rough draft of absurdity. I’d count it a good day indeed at the word processor if I came up with any of the following on my own:
“Russian Public Television has cancelled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s talk show.”
“Everybody knows that I have tougher ethics rules than any previous president.” (Clinton.)
“Alert Customs official noticed ‘something weird’ about a woman’s bosom. And on further inspection found 65 baby snakes in her bra.”
“A Greenwich, Connecticut, CEO plead guilty to defecating on the food cart on a flight from Rio to New York. His defense was that he had been barred from using the first class toilet.” If that was the defense, the plea was wise. (Bonus point: the gentleman’s no doubt proud wife runs a company of her own called The Moving Experience.)
“A Wilmington, North Carolina, neurosurgeon’s license was suspended after he left a patient’s brain exposed for 25 minutes while he got lunch.”
“An airliner heading to South Africa was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing in Britain after 72 flatulent pigs triggered its fire alarms.”
Heathrow, we have a problem.
Some years ago, after watching a forest fire annihilate thousands of hectares of southern France, the sky buzzing with military airplanes ferrying water from a nearby lake, I was told a story utterly harrowing, yet —forgive me—ineffably comic. After this fire had burned itself out, they found the remains of a man, snorkel, goggles, and flippers in the upper branches of a charred tree. One minute, you’re looking down at little brightly colored fishies in the water, the next you’re being dumped out of a plane onto a forest fire. What did they say at this poor guy’s funeral? That God loved him?
“French inventor Yves Renault has fit oysters with pop-open tabs and a French firm expects 50 million ‘ringed’ oysters to be sold in France this winter.” My parents call this sort of thing Problems of the Idle Rich.
Finally:
“Three janitors trying to freeze a gopher to death caused an explosion that injured 19 people.” The last paragraph reads, “The gopher survived and was later released in a field, unharmed.” Here one discerns the hand of God. Wherever you stand on the Problem of Job, you have to admire the way He intervenes when the least of His creatures are threatened by cretins armed with freon and lit cigarettes.
You could add to the above items any statement made by any lawyer on behalf of any Menendez brother since August of 1989. I’m thinking in particular of that woman—I cannot bring myself to say her name—you
know, the one with the hair, who complained after hanging the first jury that it was an outrage that bail was being denied these two angels who had shotgunned their parents to death, pausing to reload while Mom crawled across the carpet with
her
brain exposed. “These are terrific kids,” she said.
Hypocrisy is the night soil of satire. I say, Thank God for defense lawyers, politicians and cigarette lobbyists. They keep people like me in business. I don’t flatter myself that my worst shots at them accomplish anything more than a transitory rouging of their cheeks. (If that.) The chairman of Philip Morris, the international tobacco company, was asked by
Business Week
if he had read
Thank You for Smoking
, an “exquisitely vicious” (
Washington Post
) novel about the tobacco industry. He said he’d found it “very amusing.” His surname, by the way, is Bible, not that I would have dared to use that, fictionally. But—smart fellow, clever answer. Never complain, never explain. Give Mr. Bible a little legal wiggle room, and he might even quote Claud Cockburn at you: “You cannot satirize a man who says, ‘I’m only in it for the money and that’s all there is to it.’ ” If he and his ilk were allowed by their lawyers to say, “What do you take us for, morons? Of course we know cigarettes kill you, but they’re legal, people love them, and we can make a killing selling them.” Try to distill an “exquisitely vicious” satire out of that.
As for the politicos, here’s the stump speech I’m waiting to hear:
“My friends, I’ve done a lot of rotten things in my life. Cheated on my wife, gotten drunk, fallen down the stairs, hit the kids, kicked the dog, dodged the draft, smoked dope, snorted coke and mainlined crystal meth. I’ve cut so many deals with shady people it would take ten grand juries working overtime just to keep up with the indictments. As President, I will stand on the White House balcony holding a licked finger up to the air to see which way the wind is blowing. I’ll put my friends and cronies, even the ones who should already be in jail, in positions of authority. There will be so many special prosecutors looking into my administration that you will never lack for entertainment. As for the problems facing our nation, I’ll do what I can, but, frankly, I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot anyone can do at this point, things are so screwed up. But I really, really want to be President. I want the limousine and the motorcade and the flashing lights and the big, big airplane.”
I’d love to write that guy’s inaugural speech.
JONES PLEDGES ERA OF ‘SAME GAME, DIFFERENT NAME’;
WILL ‘MOST LIKELY RAISE TAXES FIRST CHANCE I GET’
Where were we?
Karp!
Oh yeah, titles.
By now I was sort of despairing. I had that thousand-yard-stare of the creatively challenged. I was unresponsive with the kids, the way I am when they remind me that it’s time for “us” to swab out their hamster’s disgusting cage. (Highlight of my week.) I would sit silently amidst family gaiety, mumbling to myself like one of the inmates in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“What about …” I would say, biting down on a pathetic pun. One night I looked up from the Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and said, imploringly, “
Crave the Whales?
” You see, there’s a piece in the book about—oh, never mind. By now Lucy was sugar-coating her reactions. A bad sign. What fun it must be, being married to a writer.