Boomers, beware

NO question that Christopher Buckley’s new novel, “Boomsday,” is a supremely silly book, very much in keeping with his earlier Washington farces. That assessment is not meant to be negative; the supremely silly novel is one of life’s great treats, as P.G. Wodehouse proved over and over again.

The key factors in assembling a supremely silly novel are the following: a supremely silly but perfect plot, a ridiculous cast of largely unbelievable but attractive characters, an utter lack of relevance or meaning, complete modesty on the part of the writer and pages full of lightness, wit and charm. The purpose of such books is twofold: to make its readers laugh and to dispel all unhappy or inimical thoughts from their minds -- indeed, at top form, to dispel all thought, period.

In this, Buckley is pretty much successful, partly because he has set his book in a lesser Wodehousian milieu. Although it’s not the ditsy world of butlered London flats, eating clubs and rich aunts’ country houses, but instead the world inside the Beltway, it is still a supremely silly place in many ways -- even without the controlling hand of an author to set up the slapstick and roll out the jokes. Buckley, a Republican by birth -- his father is the well-known conservative writer, editor and television pundit William F. Buckley Jr. -- was once a speechwriter for President Bush I, so he knows how to move his characters through this supposedly serious world of policymaking and governance and how to ensure that congressmen, political scandal, lobbying, spin campaigns and the rest of the Washington mix become even funnier on paper than they are in reality. He’s done it several times before, most notably with “The White House Mess” (1986) and “Thank You for Smoking” (1994).

One of the weakest but also most amusing things about the book is its central character, Cassandra “Cass” Devine, a 29-year-old, Ann Coulter-ish blogger with frequently mentioned long legs and blond hair, who predicts the demise of the American Way of Life, or at least the economy, if the nation’s young are forced to mortgage their futures to pay for the declining years of the baby boomers. What’s irritating about her is that although she’s given some funny one-liners, she’s not funny. She’s strait-laced, she’s charmless, she’s humorless and she’s capable of saying things like “I have to spend the rest of my life with myself one way or the other, and I’d rather not spend it detesting myself for going back on what I believe in.” Well, what could be more annoying, more of a downer, than that kind of preachy self-righteousness?

But what makes Cassandra amusing is that what she believes in and lives for -- and blogs for, because of course this kind of serious, single-minded, ambition-fueled woman would be a blogger -- is her generation’s policy fantasy: that baby boomers, as their national duty, should commit suicide by age 70 rather than live off the Social Security largesse of young working people, thereby impoverishing them. She offers a modest proposal: government incentives for suicide -- the earlier the suicide, the more attractive the incentive.

Cass has personal reasons for her assault on the older generation. Her father spent the money reserved for her college tuition to fund the start-up of his dot-com, and Cass, who, as you might expect, had worked long and hard to get into Yale, ends up joining the Army instead. She later discovers that bad Dad, who has remarried, has bribed Yale to admit his stepson, since there is no way such a half-wit could get in unaided. The news makes Cass go ballistic (which is not the kind of phrase Buckley would hesitate to use), and she launches a campaign for “Voluntary Transitioning,” the new euphemism for suicide. By around Page 100, she’s become genuinely hilarious, as an old-fashioned pill trying to be cute and successful in the middle of a new-fangled whirlwind.

The plot manages its supreme and satisfying silliness even though it hovers around important issues of the dullest kind: Social Security, healthcare for seniors, our nation’s economic future. One’s first temptation is just to put the book down. But don’t -- plenty of pleasure is in store. There’s a one-legged congressman named Randy Jepperson, a good guy whose limb was blown off during a fact-finding trip in Bosnia-Herzegovina when he persuaded his military escort -- who happened to be Cassandra, then a corporal in Army Public Affairs -- to accompany him across a minefield. Later, back in D.C., Jepperson starts dating the demobbed Cassandra and eventually ends up running for president on a Voluntary Transitioning platform.

There’s Terry Tucker, Cassandra’s boss, a D.C. public-relations big shot who informs her that “we don’t call it PR here. ‘Strategic communications.’ ” There’s Gideon Payne, a religious right-winger and founder of SPERM (the Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule), who opposes transitioning and fantasizes about Cass. There’s a scandal involving a prostitute and Msgr. Massimo Montefeltro, a priest who drinks fabulous wines that date from 2001 (for we are in the near future in this book). And a plan by Elderheaven, an assisted-living franchise, to profit from all the transitioning goes badly awry.

These circumstances do take a while to get off the ground, though, and the one-liners, clever quips and ready asides can seem studied and even flat. Buckley will never let his readers figure things out on their own; he’s often inclined to show us just how clever he is. “President Peacham ... from the first moment he went into politics began to be haunted by the homophonic possibilities of his surname,” he writes. There is a scene in which Cass explains to her boss the similarity between the transitioning idea and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” but first she explains to him who Jonathan Swift was (“the ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ guy?”) and what the legendary satire was about, in case we are less educated than Buckley. This kind of writing is fine if you want to learn something from a novel, but not if you want it to read like a novel. It also tells you that Buckley is hoping his readers are more Generation Whatever (his coinage for the blogger generation, and worth the price of admission) than Baby Boomer, the well-read age group Cass calls the “unGreatest Generation.”

As a member of the unGreatest and virtually ready for my Social Security handouts and Elderheaven, I was glad to read Buckley’s accurate depiction of the driven, facile and self-important Generation Whatever. Buckley, who could easily room down the hall from me in the retirement community, has played both sides of the generation gap nicely, whatever his demographic aspirations for the book; he hates and is fond of both generations in equal measure.

It would be more fun (and more interesting) to read Buckley if he were meaner and more profound. But if you’re looking for a lighter, frothier version of Tom Wolfe -- and who wouldn’t be, while waiting for the next round with the real, intractable, exorbitant, demanding Tom Wolfe, and with summer coming on -- “Boomsday” is your ticket. *