Badkittyuno’s Review #15: Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley

This book was fucking hilarious.

I read Thank You For Smoking a couple years ago, which is probably Buckley’s best known book. It was pretty funny. I happened to see Supreme Courtship at Half Price Books a few weeks ago, along with a shelf full of his other novels that I didn’t know existed. I grabbed Supreme Courtship on a whim, and now I plan to go buy the rest of that shelf.

President Vanderdamp’s ratings are abysmal, because he’s doing something unheard for a first-term president: rather than spending his whole term running for reelection, he’s actually trying to get shit done. When a Supreme Court position opens up, and his first two nominations are rejected (one for “insufficiently appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird” in middle school), he’s at his wit’s end. So he picks the most popular judge in the country: Pepper Cartwright, who stars in her own Judge Judy-style television show.

By taking a television star and throwing her into politics, Buckley gets to poke fun at Washington, D.C. AND Hollywood, and he does so with glee. I could not stop laughing at this book. The politicians and judges in particular are just so wonderfully terrible.

One complaint: Buckley has Pepper Cartwright hailing from a li’l ol’ town in Texas called Plano. She uses goofy ass Southern expressions and wear spurs under her robes. Now, some of this can maybe attributed to her upbringing by a retired country sheriff. But I live in Plano (along with 300,000 other people; hardly a small town) and I get made fun of for my Texas accent here.

Than again, the rest of Supreme Courtship is so sarcastic and silly that maybe this was intentional on Buckley’s part…