Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley
GoodReads meta-data is pages rated 3.72 by 1,372 litizens.
Genre: Satire.
Verdict: Mission impossible to parody reality.
A satire that parodies the Other Guy mercilessly and yet isn’t funny because it is too much like reality. How many different ways can i-m-b-e-c-i-l-e be spelled. Not many.
It is couched as a prison therapy project for The Other Guy’s seventh Chief of Staff, who writes a memoir of his turbulent, if short, career in the White House. Herb Nutterman had been happy as a catering manager, until he got the offer he couldn’t refuse.
Many names have been changed to protect the guilty. Though on GoodReads I see those who feel their pouts deserve a wider readership don’t get it. It is Dickensian. Get it? (No, well, look it up.)
Buckley’s imagination is unequal to the task of thinking of some grotesque stupidity, indecency, or crime The Other Guy did not commit. Buckley sets out to exaggerate and ends up with understatement.
I chose it because the author is a prince of the capital ‘C’ Conservative priesthood, scion of the singular William Buckley, who along with other keepers of that flame like George Will and Gary Wills have remained human and humane in the tsunami of offal that continues.