- Buckley, Christopher.
No Way to Treat a First Lady.
New York: Random House, 2002.
ISBN 978-0-375-75875-1.
-
First Lady Beth MacMann knew she was in for a really bad day
when she awakened to find her philandering war hero presidential
husband dead in bed beside her, with the hallmark of the Paul Revere
silver spittoon she'd hurled at him the night before as he'd
returned from an assignation in the Lincoln Bedroom “etched,
etched” upon his forehead. Before long, Beth finds herself
charged with assassinating the President of the United States,
and before the spectacle a breathless media are pitching
as the “Trial of the Millennium” even begins,
nearly convicted in the court of public opinion, with the tabloids
referring to her as “Lady Bethmac”.
Enter superstar trial lawyer and fiancé Beth dumped in
law school Boyce “Shameless” Baylor who, without
the benefit of a courtroom dream team, mounts a defence
involving “a conspiracy so vast…” that the
world sits on the edge of its seats to see what will happen
next. What happens next, and then, and later, and still later
is side-splittingly funny even by Buckley's high standards,
perhaps the most hilarious yarn ever spun around a capital
murder trial. As in many of Buckley's novels, everything
works out for the best (except, perhaps, for the deceased
commander in chief, but he's not talking), and yet none of
the characters is admirable in any way—welcome to
Washington D.C.! Barbs at legacy media figures and celebrities
abound, and Dan Rather's inane folksiness comes in for delicious
parody on the eve of the ignominious end of his career. This
is satire at its most wicked, one of the funniest of Buckley's
novels I've read
(Florence
of Arabia [March 2006] is comparable, but a very
different kind of story). This may be the last Washington farce of
the “holiday from history” epoch—the author
completed the acknowledgements page on September 9th, 2001.
January 2008 