My review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999:LITTLE GREEN MENBy Christopher Buckley Random House; 300 pages; $24.95 Anyone who has ever stared in horror at one of the arrogant, priggish stars of a Sunday morning pundit show and wished upon said star a nice, long proctological consultation should get a kick out of Christopher Buckley's latest comic novel.The priggish Sunday talk-show host in question, whom Buckley calls John O. Banion, is meant to recall real-life priggish Sunday talk- show regular George F. Will in at least certain key respects: his bow ties, his Op-Ed column in a Washington newspaper, his imperious manner and his inability ever to get past his WASPish reserve.But Buckley, son of William F. Buckley and editor of Forbes FYI magazine, is too much a Washington insider to set up his Banion character as a clear-cut Will stand-in; that would not be civilized.The opening scene, in which the president of the United States shows up at the ``Sunday'' studio for a rude, badgering, real-time interview with Banion, tips us off that Buckley is taking us to a never-never version of Washington. No such scene could ever take place outside a novel.Still, the absurd, laughable Washington landscape that Buckley sketches has enough in common with the actual absurd, laughable landscape of contemporary Washington to make this book more than just riotous good fun.We're also asked to walk away with a tender hope that even Washington characters all but embalmed in a cocoon of self-congratulation and self-worship can sometimes find redemption.This is true at least of Banion, whose marriage dissolves when he goes public with a tale of his own personal Close Encounters of the Kind You Don't Want to Hear About.His revelation costs him his job and his social standing in Washington, but it does leave him free to woo the comely editor of Cosmos-politan magazine (typical articles: ``THE `RULES' OF ALIENDATING''; ``BUT WILL HE RESPECT YOU AS A HUMAN BEING?'').`` `Let's talk about you,' he said. My God, what had come over him? No Washington alpha male had ever uttered those words to a woman,'' Buckley writes. Such gentle, affectionate skewering of Washington-style self-love gives the book a constant hum of energy, as when Buckley cracks: ``The dinner was going well, each of the men satisfied that he had done most of the talking.''As for where it all ends up, better to say it's a wild ride, agents Mulder and Scully would approve, and leave it at that. Plenty happens, which helps keep the pages turning, but this is a book you read for its laugh-out-loud high points. These are more than enough to make up for occasional dull patches, and one or two jokes that seem to cross a line (one about an artist dying of AIDS, for example).Nowhere is Buckley funnier than when he lampoons the dance between politicians and the press. He turns a four-paragraph faux excerpt from the Washington Post into a tour de force, so hilarious is its knowing mocking of the way White House spin-types will use a bogus pretext for changing course.``The White House today announced that the president will be on hand after all for the launch of the final stage of the Project Celeste, the controversial space station,'' it reads.``The announcement came following emotional remarks at a press conference by Amber Lamb, a female mission specialist who is a member of the Celeste crew. Lamb, a fitness instructor who will study aerobic exercise in space, said that she felt it was `totally not fair that the president can't attend just because of politics. Celeste was his deal all along.'``Press Secretary Fred Tully said the president was `deeply moved' when he read Lamb's comments and had `decided it was his duty' to attend.''As pleasing as the novel is, and as much as Buckley has to offer as a wisecracking and wise chronicler of the madness we call Washington, a few qualms must be registered. Buckley calls himself a novelist, not just a magazine editor with a cool hobby, which means he has a certain responsibility to his craft.No form of writing is more demanding than the comic novel; it takes more work, not less. Even so, the book is littered with an obscene number of textual glitches, many of them genuinely bewildering, and there are other signs of a slapdash effort. Insane names are a good thing. But picking name after name as if you were moving your fingers randomly on the keyboard is not. The Shirley MacLaine stand-in, for example, is called Fina Delmar, which sounds like a brand of cigar. This may be some hilarious inside joke, but if so, it's lost on many readers.Also, a bizarre sprinkling of asterisked footnotes throughout the book, with explanations at the bottom of the page (Claudia Schiffer is identified as ``highly desirable German model''), makes you wonder if you're supposed to think aliens have taken over the text and need to have the obvious explained.Still, what matters most is Buckley's courage and wit in doing a job few others have the stomach or talent to pull off. He was working this territory way back in 1987, when his pitch-perfect novel ``The White House Mess'' gave us the uproarious tale of a White House aide long before ``Primary Colors.'' Let's hope he keeps it up for a good long while.Steve Kettmann is a San Francisco writer.Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
The key to an April Fools' Day prank is plausibility. Tricksters crave that perfect blending of the ordinary and the ludicrous that can spin victims into a moment of comic panic.Years ago, a friend of mine and I taught at a conservative private college in the Midwest. One semester, he hung a series of his quiet, muted paintings of the Maine coast in the school lobby. My stage was set. Using office stationary, I wrote him a letter - from the chairman of the college - complaining about the shockingly pornographic nature of his paintings. I concluded gravely, "The trustees will be meeting soon to discuss your employment status."Kids: Don't try this at home. My friend swallowed it hook, line, and sinker - and then swam off in a rage toward the chairman's office. Fortunately, someone caught him, or the trustees would have soon met to discuss my employment status.April 1 is obviously Christopher Buckley's favorite holiday, too. Today the comic author releases a hysterical novel called "Little Green Men." It's a prankster's greatest fantasy.The story opens on Washington's most pompous and feared political commentator. Every Sunday morning, John Banion runs the capital's most powerful elected officials through a brutalizing interrogation on his top-rated TV show, sponsored by a leading maker of electrocution chairs.Senators and presidents sweat under Banion's owlish gaze, but "in a medium glutted with sound bites, people were happy to come on and have 20 minutes of national TV exposure all to themselves, even if Banion sometimes extracted an admission price of flaying them alive, on air."Far from Banion's rarefied world, Nathan Scrubbs is "waiting for his computer to advise him that somewhere in Indiana another housewife had been abducted and sexually probed by aliens in a flying saucer."Poor Scrubbs works for a supersecret government organization called MJ-12. His job is to keep "the taxpaying U.S. citizenry alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space, and therefore happy to fund expansion of the military-aerospace complex."The project had started modestly by towing pie-shaped reflective disks around the desert sky, but "when the thrill of disabled vehicles and freaked-out pets wore off," MJ-12 had to start staging alien abductions. "This was trickier," Buckley notes. "For one thing, it meant finding dwarfs with security clearance. For this reason, aliens have gotten considerably bigger over the years."In a moment of recklessness, Scrubbs decides to defend the nation's new space station by converting its most vociferous critic: John Banion.Before high-ranking officials can call off their faux invaders, Banion is abducted - twice! - by aliens and becomes the world's most famous UFO proponent, the "Paul Revere of the Milky Way."Washington has endured all kinds of shocking conversions, surprises, and transformations, but for this there is no precedent. His wife pleads, his friends intervene, the press attacks, and his sponsor cancels, but no one can derail Banion's efforts to awaken the American people to the alien threat.He quickly repackages himself on a new TV show that looks "like the bar scene from 'Star Wars.' " More powerful than ever, though with a decidedly different group of fans, he calls for a Millennial Man March on Washington to demand congressional hearings on alien abduction."My name is John O. Banion," he tells the adoring millions on the Capitol steps, "and I am an abductee.""Ich bin ein kook," reads the next day's headlines.Buckley's collection of alien fanatics is worth more than a ton of antimatter. (The Tall Nordic Singers perform "We Are the World" during the Millennial Man March.) It's a decidedly bawdy book, with that classic Monty Python mixture of highbrow satire and lowbrow ribaldry. His flights of comedy zigzag through the story like UFOs over Area 51, and his ear for the ridiculous is out of this world. Tuck "Little Green Men" away for a quiet night in the crop circles.http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0401/p1...
What do You think about Little Green Men (2008)?
WFB was very proud of his son, as well he should have been. Christopher Buckley continues the legacy of Buckley wit and increases my risibility index with every reading. Little Green Men is no exception. Buckley takes conspiracy theories and UFOlogists to task in a book filled with so much black comedy that, as with Thank You For Smoking, you feel like you've been dumped into the middle of a preposterously conceived noir novel.But Buckley does write comedy. The plot follows that little U we're taught to recognize, but Buckley just keeps fooling us about where the "bottom" is (sort of like today's stock market situation). This book also has the distinction of having the funniest footnotes I've read since A Princess Bride. Here's one that defines the CIA:*U.S. intelligence agency formerly tasked with overthrows of insignificant Central American countries, inept invasions of Caribbean dictatorships, and disastrous meddlings in Southeast Asia. Its main focus, in the post-Cold-War era, has been to employ people who will sell vital classified information about it to foreign governments. Its current budget is estimated at $27 billion per year, which may seem like a lot but is still not enough to enable it to find out if countries like India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. (p. 33n)Like his pere, Buckley is apt to wander into the bon mot of a foreign language from time-to-time. Yet, though it never seemed pretentious in the elder Buckley, Buckley the Younger often uses a foreign word or phrase to suggest the faux-erudition of Washington power-brokers. As with Buckley the Elder, I've been able to pick up a new vocabulary word or two each time I open one of their books. In Little Green Men, I was exposed to the French word bouleverse' for the first time. I doubt that I will be able to use this word for being turned upside-down, being overthrown, or distressed in a sermon, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it someday.SPOILER ALERT: What if the UFOlogists were partially right and our government was deliberately misleading us with regard to alien abductions and flying saucers? What if there was a semi-legitimate national security reason to do so? What if there was a reason that no credible sources seem ever to be abducted? And what would happen if a seeming credible sources was abducted? That is the thesis of this very funny novel where credible source and alien maverick within the top-secret agency both went off the deep end. Hilarity (or at least a high level of bemusement) ensues.
—Johnny
Originally reviewed at Minnesota Reads.Confession: I'm obsessed with aliens. Outer space, mind-probing, little green men.Okay, obsessed is a strong word. Fascinated is probably better. But I should clarify – I'm not overly fascinated by their possible existence; I'm fascinated by how believers are so certain of their existence and their visitations to Earth.Have you seen “Ancient Aliens” on The History Channel? They can't figure out how people in ancient cultures did certain things, so they've must've had help from aliens. I cannot physically pry myself from the couch when the orange-tanned guy with the wacky black hair tells me how aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids because they couldn't have done it on their own. The stones are just too big; they needed help and that help was from aliens. That's good stuff.Or how about Roswell? Or the Canadian Roswell at Shag Harbor, Nova Scotia? Or the amazing 80-minute Dan Aykroyd interview (yes, THAT Dan Aykroyd) where he tells alien tales and calls upon us to demand the government tell us the truth? The truth is out there. It's Dan Aykroyd and he's totally serious.Yes, all of this fascinates me. Aliens, abductions, crop circles, cattle mutilations, and predictions of alien help in our past will continue to fascinate me until believers are satisfied with an answer, which I don't think will ever happen unless the answer is that aliens are visiting us.This brings me to a novel that makes fun of alien culture – Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley.Buckley handles alien abductions the same way “Wag the Dog” handled war – they're real, but not in the way we think; they're staged by the government. Abductions are carried out by a secret segment of the CIA in the hopes that fear continues to spread and people continue to back defense and space funding.At the center of Little Green Men are two men, the obnoxious, Bill-O'Reilly-like TV news personality, Banion, and the man who is sick of managing the fake alien abductions, Scrubbs. Drunk and annoyed by Banion's recent television tirade against the president, Scrubbs orders for the abduction and anal probing of Banion.Because of his abduction, Banion starts talking publicly about aliens, abductions, and UFOs, and his credibility and connections in Washington D.C. start to fade. He becomes obsessed with finding out the truth and demanding government officials do something.After he ordered Banion's abduction, knowing it was not acceptable, Scrubbs goes on the run. He starts thinking his work laptop is programmed to blow up and people are tailing his every move. He also starts feeling bad for Banion. Eventually the two pair up and try to take down the establishment.I really liked the beginning of the book and the idea of alien abductions being a government conspiracy. Most conspiracy theories seem to exist even though the facts aren't there to back them up, so I'm not really a conspiracy theorist, but alien abductions being carried out by the government? This made me laugh.There are other laughable moments throughout the book, mostly dealing with the alien believers that start following and worshiping Banion. People claiming to be pregnant by aliens, others saying they were on the ship with Banion, and some intense alien groupies are all really amusing, especially because this is exactly what would happen if a high-profile person claimed to be abducted. The crazies would appear.The Washington D.C. government culture is also laughable in some ways. All the backhanded deals and the influence of friends and celebrities is funny, but there is something missing in this book. I was into it in the beginning, but midway I started to get a bit bored. It loses momentum and by the end I didn't care whether or not Banion and Scrubbs would be prosecuted for things they did to try to out the government. It's a good book, but I wouldn't highly recommend it.
—LeAnn Suchy
Ever Wondered Where UFOs Come From? Christopher Buckley Solves the Mystery Perhaps it requires a rarefied sense of humor to appreciate Christopher Buckley, but you wouldn’t know it from the sales figures on his books. Anyone who can write a book with endlessly eccentric characters named Sir Reginald Pigg-Vigorish, Col. Roscoe J. Murfletit, General Tunklebunker, and Deputy FBI Director Bargenberfer may be reaching the pre-adolescent in me, but he makes me laugh, dammit, and I’m not going to apologize for it, so there!In Little Green Men, not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs! Could anyone possibly wish for more?Like so many of Buckley’s satirical novels, Little Green Men tells the story of a hapless (though in this case willing) victim of the absurd circumstances surrounding him — circumstances caused in large part by a witless supporting cast with names such as those listed in the opening paragraph of this review. Buckley’s antihero here is John Oliver Banion, a pompous Sunday-morning public affairs television talk show host with a pedigree that looks just a little bit like Christopher Buckley’s (including Yale, of course!). In fact, Buckley is never better than when skewering People Like Us, and he does it with such skill that I can almost imagine him cackling in the background as he types away.One fine day John O. Banion is slicing into the rough on his exclusive country club golf course when he is abducted and “probed” by aliens — not Little Green Men, actually, but silver ones whom UFO taxonomists call Tall Nordics. The action that radiates from this inexplicable event is far too complicated, and far too unlikely — not to mention funny — to sum up, so I’ll leave it to you when you read this beautifully crafted little book.Little Green Men is the fourth of the nine satirical novels Christopher Buckley has published since 1986. I’ve read most of them and reviewed two of them here: The White House Mess and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? I also found Boomsday and Supreme Courtship hilarious, though I read them before joining Goodreads.
—Mal Warwick
