Has Anyone Seen My Toes? by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 6, 2022

The fear of dementia probably strikes most people as they age, at least those who have a mind they would miss if they lost it. On the theory that humor conquers fear, Has Anyone Seen My Toes? could be a therapeutic read for older readers who wonder whether they should end their lives before they forget the combination to the gun safe.

The nameless protagonist is a writer. He’s staying in a small community in South Carolina, the location of his disastrous movie about patriotic prostitutes during the Revolutionary War (a movie that still sells well in hotel pay-for-views). He’s gained weight during the pandemic. In fact, he put on so much weight he can’t see his toes when he stands on the scale and his I-phone no longer recognizes him (he believes the phone is fat shaming him).

The protagonist’s behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. His wife complains when he sits in the dark at night, prepared to shoot moles that are ruining his yard (he suspects her of siding with the moles). He has started a screenplay that turns out to a version of the movie The Eagle Has Landed, substituting Roosevelt for Churchill. He is certain that he has seen attack ads in an election for coroner, but his inability to recall his conversations about the ads with the candidates suggests that he is suffering from the onset of dementia.

On the other hand, a different sort of mental disturbance might be to blame, one that counts paranoia among its symptoms. The writer is convinced that Putin is trying to sway the coroner’s election and that only he can thwart Putin’s dastardly plan. At the same time, he’s certain that the mortician running against Putin’s favored candidate has been burying people alive. It’s no surprise that the writer visits a psychiatrist before the story ends.

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is a novel of digressions that magically add up to a plot. The progtagonist is always looking things up. We learn obscure details about Gone with the Wind, Carl Reiner, and celebrity deaths. We learn that Donald Sutherland’s tongue is periodically ravaged by parasites. We learn the etymology of several fun but useless words. We learn about writers who committed suicide. We learn the many reasons why the protagonist (like me) has never been able to force himself to finish reading Proust’s unbearably dull Remembrance of Things Past (or whatever they’re calling it these days).

It might not be politically correct to build a comedy around dementia (or any other disease) but Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is awfully funny. And no spoilers here, but maybe the writer’s problem isn’t quite what it seems. In any event, confronting the fear of dementia with humor might be the best approach to mental health, given the failure of expensive but profitable drugs like Aduhelm.

While the novel’s focus is on the fear of dementia, its humor is wide-ranging. The writer pays $7500 a year for a concierge doctor because, for that price, the doctor won’t hassle him about his bad habits. Christopher Buckley makes fun of the South, “where people start driving at fourteen and by eighteen are competing in NASCAR.” He mocks plantation tourism and its tendency to overlook the slave quarters.

Buckley also has fun with Trump and the far right. The doctor responds to COVID by prescribing whatever drug Trump has most recently mentioned. The writer goes along with it, although he would draw the line at “injecting Clorox or shoving a lightstick up my ass.” And when the writer takes the 5-word memory test that Trump regarded as proof of his genius, he comes up with a 5-word phrase from his screenplay, possible proof that he is even more demented than the last president. Quotations from Mein Kampf illustrate how American propagandists on the right are following Hitler’s advice: tell bold lies, repeat them endlessly, appeal to emotion rather than reason, and wait for weak minds to bow to your authority.

Buckley’s political humor scores bullseyes because he aims at unmissable targets. For the most part, however, the story is apolitical. The pandemic, with its toilet paper shortages and spreading bellies, is the source of familiar humor. By giving his protagonist an addled mind, Buckley takes the story a step or two beyond the familiar, sometimes reaching toward the absurd, but he never has to reach far to get a laugh.

RECOMMENDED

Make Russia Great Again by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 14, 2020

I hurried to finish Make Russia Great Again because after the election it might lose its relevance entirely. While other novels have taken shots at a fictional Trump, it seems doubtful that any of them will be remembered after Trump is gone. Making fun of Trump is the nightly sport of talk show hosts, but they’ll move on in January if Biden wins. I suspect readers will do the same. Nobody wants to revisit a nightmare.

As the (not so failing) New York Times noted, the difficulty with satirizing the Trump administration is that reality outpaces fiction. By the time this book made it to market, Trump had found new ways to self-destruct that even the most masterful satirist would have been unable to imagine.

Make Russia Great Again takes place shortly before the 2020 election. Some characters (like Trump and Pompeo) are real, others are thinly disguised. Sean Hannity is Seamus Colonnity, Ivanka is Ivunka and she’s married to Jored, Pence is Pants, Graham is Biskitt, etc.

The novel’s narrator is Herbert K. Nutterman, who rose through the management ranks at various Trump properties before Trump tapped him to become the new chief of staff. Two storylines, other than the upcoming election, drive the plot. First, an American computer program called Placid Reflex autonomously hacked the Russian election and gave the Communist candidate a landslide victory in the first round of voting. Putin isn’t pleased but doesn’t immediately suspect Trump who is, after all, in Putin’s pocket.

Second, a Russian oligarch and Trump buddy named Oleg Pishinsky is widely suspected of causing the demise of an American journalist who investigated his molybdenum empire and other shady endeavors. Responding to those suspicions, Congress passed a law that disadvantages Oleg’s desire to sell molybdenum to the United States. Oleg wants Trump to get it rescinded. If Trump says no, Oleg will release videos of Trump having sex with each contestant of Miss Universe 2013 after promising each the crown. Oleg also did away with a contestant who wasn’t satisfied with being paid off, a crime that might look bad for Trump. Unfortunately for Trump, Congress isn’t buying his pitch that the US has a desperate need for molybdenum, an element that Trump can’t pronounce.

There are moments of genuine humor in the novel. I particularly enjoyed Trump’s response when the videos begin to leak. He changes “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Hard Again,” an improvement that his loyal base embraces. The Evangelicals, of course, look away without wavering in their support.

While the story is fun, some of Nutterman’s observations — about, for example, the “liberal mainstream media” obsession with reporting true facts rather than alternative facts — fall flat because they really aren’t satirical at all. Much of the book depicts Trump as he is, without the exaggeration that defines satire. Trump and his echo chamber entourage might be clownish but they aren’t all that funny.

The book does have a prescient quality, if only because Trump is predictable. Without knowing who the Democratic nominees would be, Buckley has the president condemning them as socialists, a label that Trump and uninformed inhabitants of the fringe have tried without success to pin on Biden. Since Buckley didn’t know who the candidates would be, Buckley has Trump calling them Loser One and Loser Two — which is admittedly Trumpish.

The book was written before the pandemic (which, Trump just assured us, is over), a fact that detracts from both its relevance and its satirical punch. Trump’s real sins are much worse than the sins Buckley imagines, a reality that compromises the ability to laugh at Trump’s foibles.

Having said that, Make Russia Great Again does deliver a steady diet of chuckles and an occasional full-bellied laugh. Trump’s fans won’t like it and might even hold a book burning, although that would require them to actually buy the book, which seems unlikely. If Trump wins reelection, readers who want to laugh after they finish crying might want to spend time with it. If Trump is defeated, the book might have value as nostalgia. As political satire, however, it is only a mild success.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Judge Hunter by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 1, 2018

The Judge Hunter tells the story of how New Amsterdam became New York, but tells it sideways, as the tale of an unwitting spy who is purportedly searching for two regicides who fled to New England because of their involvement in the death of King Charles I. A history lesson has never been funnier, even if the funny bits are invented.

Samuel Pepys is Clerk of the Royal Navy, giving him the means to support, albeit reluctantly, his unemployed relatives, including his feckless brother-in-law, Balthasar de St. Michel. When Lord Downing hatches a plan to annoy the colonial Puritans who have sheltered two regicide judges (Whalley and Goffe), Pepys recommends sending Balthasar (“Balty”) to the colonies, because he knows of no one with a greater natural talent for annoyance.

In Massachusetts, Balty is both annoying and annoyed. He has little in common with Puritans, who immediately threaten to skewer his tongue with a hot poker for his blasphemous manner of speech. But as he learns from Colonel Huncks, who has been assigned to assist him in judge hunting, the Puritans would happily murder him rather than give up Whalley and Goffe, given that Whalley and Goffe did God’s work (in the Puritans’ eyes) by ridding England of Charles I, who was no friend of Puritans.

Unlike Balty, Huncks is competent. He’s also a British spy. Much of the novel’s humor comes from the contrast between Balty’s bumbling and Huncks’ efforts to keep him alive as they pursue their mission. Huncks’ true mission is not to find the regicides but to gather information in anticipation of the arrival of the British Navy, which plans to attack the Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam, a plan that Pepys opposes on the ground that the Navy is not equipped to win a war.

With that setup, the story proceeds on two fronts: in England, Pepys faces accusations of disloyalty, much like the colonists who are harboring Whalley and Goffe, while in New England, Balty hastens forward on a mission that never seems to be supported by a plan. In blissful ignorance of political matters, Balty goes about his business, inadvertently saving a pretty Quaker named Thankful from being flogged to death after she wanders nude into a Puritan church nude as an act of protest.

Balty might be annoying but he isn’t rude, and his unwarranted sense of self-importance adds to his charm as a character. He also has a good heart, which makes him a likable character. Balty finds himself drawn to Thankful, perhaps because he has seen her in the nude, but Thankful also has a good heart and is another character the reader will easily like. A bit of romantic comedy adds spice to the historical comedy, with familiar figures of colonial history making cameo appearances. In fact, Christopher Buckley appended a short discussion of actual history to the novel, giving context to the story’s characters and events.

The Judge Hunter isn’t an action novel, but it has enough action to keep the story energized, and more than enough silliness to keep the reader laughing. At the same time, parts of the story are gruesome. Some scenes are sad and some of those are poignant. That’s what happens when fiction is based on history: reality intrudes. That isn’t a bad thing, because one of the novel’s points is that life and the people who live it can be quite funny, even clownish, but that the incalculable value of life can only be measured against the certainty of death. And if we must die, we might as well die laughing.

RECOMMENDED

The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on December 8, 2015

The Relic Master is a fun, light-hearted story. It combines action with comedy, a bit of romance, occasional drama, and a touch of mad genius. Funny, touching, and sometimes exhilarating, The Relic Master is a shrewd Middle Ages romp with a surprisingly coherent plot.

Dismas makes a living hunting down religious relics for his two rival clients, Archbishop Albrecht and the ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. Bits of bone from a saint’s skeleton, shards of wood from the cross, and straw from the manger are just a few of the thousands of items that collectors seek. Most of the relics are fake and Dismas stays away from obvious attempts to defraud, but by applying a series of tests (does the relic have a sweet smell? has it been known to promote healing?) he tries to authenticate them as best he can. Frederick is the more discerning of his clients while Albrecht wants to acquire as many relics as possible and doesn’t much care whether they are genuine.

With the approval of Pope Leo X, Albrecht (among many others) sells relics as indulgences -- buy one and your time in Purgatory is shortened. The more you pay, the less time you need to serve. Apostle Peter’s fishing boat might knock a couple hundred years off a wealthy man’s sentence. Half of the sale proceeds go to the Pope, who uses them to build cathedrals or to …. well, there are rumors. Dismas doesn’t recall the Bible mentioning anything about buying one’s way out of Purgatory by investing in indulgences but it is not his place to criticize. Martin Luther is more vocal in his criticism, citing indulgences as evidence of church corruption that justify the Protestant Reformation.

The historical background to the story is sound, but the story gets its kicks from both the characters that Christopher Buckley invents and from a lively plot that involves the greatest relic of them all -- a burial shroud that, before it made its way to Turin, was known as the Shroud of Chambéry. Dismas and an artistic friend get into a bit of trouble with one version of the shroud and Dismas can only redeem himself (or die trying) by getting into trouble with another.

Dismas is a likable character, kind-hearted but crafty and not immune to temptation. Personality traits of other characters (greed, vanity, lasciviousness, slothfulness) are magnified in amusing ways. Buckley introduces a female character who adds wisdom and common sense to the mix while serving as a love interest for Dismas.

The Relic Master moves at a good pace. Clever plot twists in the last quarter lead to a satisfying conclusion. This could almost be classified as a tongue-in-cheek historical thriller with a romantic element, but the novel actually defies classification. It is both original and enjoyable.

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