Book Review: Thank You for Smoking

Title: Thank You for Smoking

Author: Christopher Buckley

Date: 1994

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 0-6789-43174-8

Length: 272 pages

Quote: “Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now no one had actually compared him to Satan.”

Naylor, a maker of nails. Cigarettes, known in twentieth century slang as coffin nails. Nick, a typical Bright Young Thing—at forty, still frequently described as young—in Washington, lost a job on a TV news show after hastily delivering an inaccurate news announcement. Then he was hired by a tobacco lobbying company as the “smokesman” who, in the 1990s, went on TV to argue that it wasn’t absolutely certain that cigarettes caused cancer.

Obviously, all Glyphosate Awareness people now know, this satirical novel is very relevant to our time. Nick is much nicer than some of our opposition. He’s also much nicer than some of his co-workers. Therefrom arises the plot.

We see Nick doing his job, lying like a premium-grade Persian rug on the TV talk shows, torturing a superordinate who obviously wants to replace him, feuding with a U.S. Senator who seems like a parody of Ted Kennedy, deftly manipulating movie producers and a British Prime Minister who might be a parody of Margaret Thatcher, keeping his son enrolled at St. Euthanasius, maintaining less than loving but polite relationships with a demographically inclusive catalogue of women. (He’s mostly over Gazelle, the Black one, currently taking speakerphone messages from Heather, the redhead, and Jeannette, the ice blonde, while in bed with the one who’s not on the phone; in the past there was a Paula whose complexion is not described, and some of the suspense comes from wondering whether he and his real friend Polly will stop acting as if they were still married to other people,) He finds consolation in the company of two good friends, Polly from the alcoholic beverage lobby and Bobby Jay from the firearms lobby. The three of them, and sometimes lobbyists for other controversial causes, get together to commiserate about being insulted by opponents. If the opposition were to go beyond insults, would they still stick together?

They would, it turns out. The old saying, “Welcome to Washington! If you want a friend, adopt a dog” is not applicable to Nick. If he had to pay his own legal expenses rather than relying on company funds, Polly would sell her investments to help him. Bobby Jay would draw his pistol. And Nick would back down from a confrontation rather than let Polly lose her savings or Bobby Jay go to prison.

They’re brought to the point of showing exactly how loyal they are to one another when Nick is physically kidnapped and forced to give up his cherished cigarettes by a near-death experience. Recovering from a week of torture while spinning it for all it’s worth, he starts to find out what his co-workers are really like, too. The boss, a prematurely old cardiac patient who has seven daughters and calls Nick his “son,” keeps raising Nick’s salary. His supervisor keeps giving Nick increasingly impossible assignments. And what about Jeannette? Is she really starstruck by his talent and fortitude, or does she just want his job enough to play filthy tricks to get it?

It would be a pity to spoil the suspense so all I’ll say is that, on the fourth reading just before I wrote this review, I still laughed out loud. So will you.