Hey, I promised you some book reviews, didn't I? I always forget to do them, 'cause unlike with movies, the second I finish a book I start in on another. But I finished
No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley last week sometime.
If you're wondering, yes, he's the son of that other Buckley, the one with the stick up his ass and the patrician faux-British accent (by the way, faux is no pronounced just like it looks. The x is no longer silent! Down with the French!). As you'd expect, this Buckley knows politics, especially the little, crude, behind-the-scenes details that you usually don't see on CNN. As you absolutely wouldn't expect, this Buckley is hilarious. One of my favorite comic (comedy? Oh yea, comedic. I don't mean it had pictures in it) novels is
Thank You for Smoking, which made me laugh out loud constantly.
Well, No Way to Treat a First Lady is nowhere near that funny, although it does have its moments. But the characters in the new book are a bit more fleshed out than the last one. You can imagine them having lives that go on outside the book.
I probably should have done this at the beginning, but oh well. Now Way to Treat a First Lady is about, obviously, the First Lady. She's caught her husband philandering for the last time. She was willing to look the other way before, but not when it's with the wife of a donor in the Lincoln bedroom. So she wacks him with a Paul Revere spittoon and goes to sleep. When she wakes up, he's dead, apparently from a brain hemorrhage.
Now she needs a lawyer. It so happens that she went to law school with the country's best lawyer, who charges one thousand bucks an hour to defend the indefensible. But she used to sleep with him. They were engaged. She dumped him for the President. But he takes the case anyway, or is it because of all that?
Did she do it? Either way, will she be convicted of assasination? Will she and what's-his-name (I can't remember the fargin' lawyer's name) sleep together, fall back in love, get married? I'm not telling.
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