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President Donald P. Vanderkamp, the most winsome fictional chief executive since David Palmer was assassinated several seasons ago on 24, has a problem. There's a vacancy on the Supreme Court—or so goes the not-implausible premise of Christopher Buckley's delectable entertainment, Supreme Courtship. ("Supreme Court Associate Justice J. Mortimer Brinnin's deteriorating mental condition had been the subject of talk for some months now, but when he showed up for oral argument with his ears wrapped in aluminum foil, the consensus was that the time had finally come to retire.") Vanderkamp has put forward two superbly qualified candidates, each of them rejected in turn by the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Relentless opposition research on the first candidate reveals that as a 12-year-old, he wrote a review of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird for his elementary school newspaper in which he observed that, "Though the picture is overall OK, it's also kind of boring," leading the powerful chair of the committee, Senator Dexter Mitchell—who himself covets a spot on the High Court—to recall the specter of the Ku Klux Klan.)
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Inspiration strikes Vanderkamp one night at Camp David, as he is channel-surfing in search of a bowling tournament. He stumbles on Courtroom Six, a highly rated show (though new to him) in the Judge Judy vein, starring a stunning native Texan named Pepper Cartwright. He likes her down-to-earth judicial style. He likes her altogether. And he decides to make her his next nominee for the Supreme Court.
Here we should pause to note that, while novels rarely play any part in national affairs, I think it's entirely possible that Buckley's novel—published in September, but available in galleys several months earlier—gave John McCain (or someone in his inner circle, who brought it to McCain's attention) the idea of choosing Sarah Palin to be his running-mate. Not that Sarah Palin and Pepper Cartwright are identical. For starters, Pepper is an atheist, more or less, the daughter of a loony but immensely successful TV evangelist, while Palin is a conservative evangelical, more or less, representing a segment of the American populace that Buckley seems to loathe (about which more below). Still, as wild cards the two are remarkably similar. Maybe there was no causal connection between the novel and the vice-presidential nomination. Whether or not there was, Buckley intuited—before the fact—something in the air that made the Palin phenomenon possible.
But that's merely an aside—it is not the book's principal claim on our attention. Funny writers in general and satirists in particular rarely get their due as writers. Of course there are exceptions. Tom Wolfe is noticed in at least some accounts of contemporary fiction. But what about Richard Dooling, Carl Hiaasen, Christopher Buckley?
So who cares? Let the literati carry on with their tea party. A tea party, by the way, where many of the invited guests are Subversive. They have identification badges to prove it.
Well. We should care. All fiction exists in a kind of tension between two poles. On the one hand, all fiction is "escape fiction." Raymond Chandler's dissection of the cozy English murder mystery was very witty, but his own splendid books are every bit as stylized—and every bit as remote from "real life," crudely construed. On the other hand, all fiction, from the naturalism of Zola to the self-contained drollery of P. G. Wodehouse, involves us in a rather mysterious transaction with the Real.
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