Customer Reviews

Thank You for Smoking: A Novel

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Buckley has a light, pleasant, humorous easy-to-read style, and he fully understands the double-think, newspeak and weasel words that are inherent in the political games, pro and con, surrounding tobacco. No one comes off looking good here. Everyone is a liar with ulterior motives concerning power, perks and attention. Unfortunately, his characters are really more caricatures than anything else. Still, this is a funny work, and I'd recommend it to get the Big Picture on Big Tobacco, and far worse, Big Government.

There's something very smug about these parodies of Washington insiders. Even The West Wing gets tedious with its dozen storylines about whether the president should say a few words against a lobbying group. At first this book has the potential to overcome that curse. It's wry. It has a morally ambiguous main character. It has some great parodies.

Then it dies. It reminds me of Primary Colors in that it's way too enamored with the political process to really get things rolling. There's too much material about taking meetings and not enough about people. The characters are all broadly drawn, the females are vixens, the jokes aren't funny. When it gets to Hollywood the writer trots out the same old cliche about Hollywood producers wanting to throw any crap on the screen in order to sell products. Is this supposed to be funny? I suppose in the Player it was cool, but the joke has died from misuse.

Overall this is a fluff book that should have been better. The main problem is the cool cynicism. Yeah, everyone is out to get something. Yeah that's funny sometimes, but not here. When all is said and done we're left with a bunch of unlikeable characters in a stupid book.

Good job. Great fun!!!
The ending is kind of weak,but before you there you got a lot of fun.

I always know I'll like someone if they liked this book.

Only Christopher Buckley could findd the humor in being a corporate PR representative for the tobacco companies. He deftly manages to make the main character both amusing, and even the object of our sympathies as he lands in one outlandish predicament after another. Pick up this book for a good laugh.

Nick Naylor, the protagonist of Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Smoking," gives new definition to the term "antihero." Despite his position, he's not really a bad guy. Sure, he makes six figures a year lying through his teeth as the chief lobbyist at the Academy of Tobacco Studies in Washington, but he's not really making anybody smoke cigarettes. As he explains it, he's just moderating between two competing groups, namely the cigarette companies and the anti-smoking zealots. Besides, someone's got to pay the mortgage and his son's prep-school tuition. Even he realizes that his rationalization sounds like something a Nuremberg defendant might say ("I vas only paying ze mortgage"), but it takes a certain courage to go on TV and say there's no demonstrable link between smoking and disease. Perhaps Buckley's greatest achievement here is that he can take a guy who lies to sell cigarettes and make him into a sympathetic figure.

Nick Naylor's life provides the basis for Buckley's often hilarious look at the "neo-puritanism" of mid-nineties America and the attempts of tobacco companies to fight it. And although I hate cigarettes, I think a book like this needed to be written. Anybody who's ever been repulsed by those ridiculous "Truth" ads where a bunch of obnoxious young people harass those who make and sell cigarettes should get a good laugh at Buckley's portrayal of the sanctimonious forces of political correctness. As Nick tells Oprah Winfrey in one uproarious scene, cigarette opponents aren't above manipulating children and trying to tell everyone else how to think. And anything that takes the wind out of the sails of political correctness is fine by me.

Much of the book's humor comes from Nick's lunch meetings with his friends in the Mod (an acronym for "Merchants of Death") Squad. Composed of Nick, alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey, and one-armed gun advocate Bobby Jay Bliss, the Mod Squad is sort of a combination support group and mutual admiration society. In the presence of their own, the three death merchants can work on their PR strategies, discuss their latest misfortunes at the hands of the neo-puritans, and compare just how much death they've caused and how hated they are. In one particularly humorous scene, Polly and Bobby Jay are saying how much hate mail they get, and Nick just scoffs and says, "HATE mail? ALL of my mail is hate mail."

Of course, even satires need plots, so Buckley throws in some intrigue regarding a plot to have Nick killed. When a team of killers kidnaps Nick and covers him in nicotine patches, Nick finds himself suspected by the FBI of having done the deed himself as a PR stunt. In an effort to clear his name, Nick eventually traces the attempt on his life to a conspiracy in the upper levels of the tobacco lobby. Although this plot had possibilities, it felt somewhat underdeveloped to me. At a mere 272 pages, "Thank You for Smoking" isn't quite long enough to function effectively as both a satire and a thriller. The plot's pretty interesting, I just would've like to see a little more space devoted to it.

Still, this book is worth a read. It's fast-paced, well written, and remarkably perceptive. More than once I found myself laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. If an avid non-smoker like myself can find himself rooting for a tobacco lobbyist, than anyone can.

As a person who used to do what these characters do, I have to admit I laughed out loud as I blushed. The shameless and never-ending spin Buckley wrote about in _Thank You for Smoking_ was a painful - and probably inadvertent - prediction of what we've reduced public policy to in the last decade. Although I'm not as fond of Buckley's other novels, this book receives my highest honor: I buy it over and over again because I'm constantly loaning it to to people who never get it back.

As a person who used to do what these characters do, I have to admit I laughed out loud as I blushed. The shameless and never-ending spin Buckley wrote about in _Thank You for Smoking_ was a painful - and probably inadvertent - prediction of what we've reduced public policy to in the last decade. Although I'm not as fond og Buckley's other novels, this book receives my highest honor: I buy it over and over again because I'm constantly loaning it to to people who never get it back.

Fantastic! I have read this book several times and it has never failed to have me laughing out loud. Naylor is one of the best characters ever and I love the portrayal of the Department of Health and Human Services (Hopeless, Helpless and Stupid)---I say all this as a health care professional who works for the department (and as a liberal!). Buckley's other books can't compare.

I waited in anticipation for this novel to arrive, could it be as entertaining as 'Little Green Men'?
Perhaps my expectations were too high... Nope.

Buckley's story, revolving around the character of Nick Naylor an intelligent Spokesperson for the tobacco industry whose primary aim is to pay the mortgage and in the process challenge himself, delivers a message with regard to politics, media propaganda and corruption.

Another gem, I almost started smoking.