Salvation Boulevard

For some time now, I have been an evangelist for Larry Beinhart.  I’ve walked into bookstores to introduce myself, and wound up pitching his books.  The conversation usually starts on the subject of political satire and who actually writes them anymore.  Christopher Buckley’s name is usually mentioned, and then I say something like, “but, who I really like is Larry Beinhart,” which is grammatically incorrect but conveys my message.  If the bookseller is young or inexperienced, the response is usually: “Who is he?”

If you’ve heard about Larry Beinhart, it’s probably because he wrote the novel American Hero, which served as inspiration for the film Wag the Dog (one of the few modern political satires with which most people seem to be familiar).  Beinhart started his career writing mystery novels, and his 1996 guide to the genre entitled How to Write a Mystery, is a useful and highly readable book.

His more recent novels, American Hero, The Librarian, and now Salvation Boulevard mix politics and elements of mystery, borrowing heavily from mystery’s close cousin: the film noir.  These books feature detective-type characters going up against powerful, sinister, and shadowy organizations.  There are conspiracies to uncover and femme fatales to complicate the journey.  Beinhart sets these dark dangerous tales in worlds of political and moral upheaval, using plots ripped from the newspaper stories that never made the front page, the articles you probably didn’t bother to read but should have.

Beinhart is a champion of these lost newspaper stories, and has also written a wonderful non-fiction book on what he calls “fog facts”: facts that are out in the public record but invisible to most of us, like water droplets on a foggy day (Example: Al Gore actually did win more votes than Bush in Florida).   Beinhart has an uncanny ability to get to the crux of a complicated political issue and explain it in a way that strips away all pretense and spin.  In Fog Facts and his editorializing on the Huffington Post, Beinhart is an illuminator and provocateur.

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Political satire is a small genre in the book world: so small, in fact, that when most readers are asked to identify a modern practitioner of this dark art, they are hard pressed to come up with a single name, save that of today’s subject: Christopher Buckley.  Mr. Buckley is the author of such works as No Way To Treat A First Lady, Florence Of Arabia, and Thank You For Smoking, and he made headlines this fall for his endorsement of Barack Obama for president (a move that led to his resignation from his columnist post at the National Review).

His latest novel, Supreme Courtship, is an enjoyable read. It will not rock your world, lead you to new heights of ecstasy, or force you to reexamine your view of modern American democracy. To be fair, I don’t think its intentions are so lofty. It will, however, take you on a pleasant journey through a wacky-yet-familiar version of our country, one in which a folksy TV judge becomes the newest Supreme Court Justice and a renegade Congress changes the Constitution to prevent the re-election of an unpopular President.

Without a doubt, the most rewarding element of Supreme Courtship is the character of Pepper Cartwright, the straight-talkin’ wise-crackin’ TV judge who is nominated to a post well beyond her expertise. Released on the heels of Sarah “You Betcha” Palin’s VP nomination, the character of Pepper seems fresh and prescient.

In interviews and in person, Mr. Buckley comes across as a witty jovial chap, and, indeed, this is a witty jovial book. While I confess I only laughed out loud a few times, I did enjoy myself for the entire ride.  The book does not thrill, but it is good fun, something we all need at this time of year.  Is it hard to put down?  Not exactly.  But Supreme Courtship is very pleasant to pick up, and it is a political novel that can be enjoyed by readers on both sides of the aisle.