In “Supreme Courtship,” art imitates life — and vice versa.
In past books, Christopher Buckley has made humorous hash of Washington institutions from the presidency on down. But when his longtime editor, Jonathan Karp, suggested he tackle the judiciary branch, Buckley struggled to find his funny bone.
“He said, ‘I want you to do the Supreme Court.’ And my first reaction was, ‘Uhhhhh,’ ” says Buckley, his palms up in a gesture of puzzlement. “And I thought about it and thought about it, but I couldn’t find a way in.”
The court, he jokes, “is both monumental and dry, except at certain convulsive moments. A better novelist could make a novel out of Brown v. Board of Education. I’m not that guy.”
But Buckley eventually located the path for “Supreme Courtship” (published by Warner Twelve), developing the tale of a sexy TV judge tapped to fill a vacancy on the high court. Pepper Cartwright, a feisty Texan, is nominated by a president who doesn’t care about re-election (his slogan: “More of the Same”) and is ticked off by the rejection of his earlier nominees.
Like Buckley’s other send-ups of the proud, the pompous and the politically clueless, it is a laugh-a-page lampoon that makes the Supremes seem anything but dull.
As is usually the case in Buckley’s political satire, art imitates life. He offers a tongue-in-cheek take on “Borking,” recounting how a Supreme Court nominee is disqualified because he gave the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” a lukewarm review — in grade school. And the book features a contested presidential election put in the court’s hands to decide.
Yet Buckley is struck by the ways in which life has also imitated his art.
With her bespectacled “naughty librarian” look, Pepper Cartwright anticipates Sarah Palin. And the ambitious Sen. Dexter “Hang ‘Em High” Mitchell bears an intentional resemblance to a certain Delaware senator now running for vice president.
Another character, Justice Silvio Santamaria, is clearly based on the pugnacious character of Antonin Scalia. “I actually had to sit down with a legal pad and devise names for [all the justices]. And by the time I got to Silvio, I was just thinking, ‘Maybe let’s just borrow him,’ ” Buckley says. “Because Scalia is something out of a novel himself. The most interesting people in real life are people about whom you could say, ‘He’s something out of a novel.’ ”
Though Buckley can envision “Supreme Courtship” following his “Thank You For Smoking” into movie theaters someday — “It’s too juicy [not to],” he says — he’s less certain how his “Vanity Fair-esque” satire will fare in the marketplace.
“Maybe Warren Buffett knows,” Buckley jokes.
“He seems to be the only person who knows anything these days.”
