I was disappointed by Buckley's last couple of novels -- Boomsday was a bit flat, and I couldn't even get through Florence of Arabia -- so I'm happy to report that the new one is a significant improvement.
As Supreme Courtship opens, President Donald Vanderdamp is struggling with sub-Bush approval ratings. He's so unpopular that the Senate, led by Majority Leader Dexter Mitchell, is rejecting his perfectly reasonable Supreme Court nominees just because they can; one is booted for the sin of saying, in a book report written at age 12, that there were "boring parts" in To Kill a Mockingbird. In a fit of pique, Vanderdamp decides to send the Senate a nominee it can't reject, the most popular judge in America -- Pepper Cartwright, of TV's most popular legal show, Courtroom Six.
Buckley alternates Judge Pepper's struggles to fit in on the Court with Vanderdamp's re-election campaign against Mitchell, a campaign which triggers a Constitutional crisis that winds up -- where else? -- in the Supreme Court.
Buckley's comedy is broad as can be, and his characters are often obvious caricatures of real-life figures. Justices Silvio Santamaria and Crispus Galavanter, for instance, are clearly inspired by Scalia and Thomas, and Dexter Mitchell's inability to stop speaking if there's a news camera nearby is reminiscent of Joe Biden at his worst.
But I found enough good laugh lines and colorful characters (I particularly liked Graydon Clenndennynn, "wisest of the Washington wise men, grayest of its eminences....the man, it was rumored, with more n's in his name than anyone else in Washington.") to keep me reading and smiling. Great literature this may not be, but it's a heckuva lot of fun.
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