“Sometimes fiction is not as strange as the truth. That’s the hard part of writing satire in America. You’re in competition with the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper.” – Christopher Buckley

What would happen if Jonathan Swift had written his pamphlet, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick, in the blogging age? Probably something similar to what happens in the novel Boomsday - the 2007 satire by Christopher Buckley.

Before I get to the novel itself, let me get this out of the way – every piece EVER written about author Christopher Buckley notes that he is the son of William F Buckley

Besides being the son of a famous father, Christopher Buckley is best known for his Washington-insider satires–capitalizing on the humor of political spin. Thank You for Smoking, for example, is one of Buckley’s more well known pieces. He came to Washington in 1981 as a speechwriter for then vice-president George H.W. Bush, allowing him to put his talent to work. Andrew Ferguson has commented that “Mr. Buckley’s ear for the cant of bureaucracy and publicity is pitch-perfect, and his rendering of the essential absurdity of so much of Washington life is unsparing but always humane.”

Boomsday revolves around Cassandra Devine a PR firm-maven by day – and the force behind the blog CASSANDRA by night. We meet Cassandra while she is dealing with the reprocussions of her most recent blog post. What is this inspiring blog post? Cassandra, fed-up paying for the excesses of the boomer generation proposes an idea, on CASSANDRA… What if people were given a financial incentive to off themselves at 65? When it get taken up by the media and then proposed on the floor of the Senate (now called a more palatable ‘Voluntary Transitioning’)… needless to say chaos ensues and politics take over.

Very early in the book (page six, to be exact) we learn that Terry Tucker, the head of Cassandra’s PR firm , apprenticed under the legendary Nick Taylor (Taylor is the Thank You for Smoking protagonist). When asked if he has forgotten what it is like to be young and angry, Terry responds:

“The anthems from my revolution are now background music in TV commercials for cholestrerol pills, on board navigation sytems for gas-guzzling SUV’s and hedge funds. Everyone sells out. Boomers just figured out how to make it an industry.”

This is very much the style of Boomsday. It is going to be quick and filled with one-liners. If that is your thing then you should enjoy this book. If you need your satire to be a little more meaty, to kill its subject, then you might tire of it quickly. As Buckley himself has said, in response to critics who ask why his satire isn’t meaner: “I am not a killer.”

And if ever one doubts Buckley’s “truth can be stranger than fiction” contention . . . here is a blog post I found (I sometimes forget that stuff like this is out there) - Obama’s Ominous Implications: Euthanasia of the Elderly May be Neccesary – truth stranger than fiction, indeed.