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Note to Self About China: Pick a Fight, Any Fight

Christopher Buckley’s Satire ‘They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?’

Christopher Buckley’s satirical novels do not normally prompt cognitive dissonance. But there’s something jolting at work in his latest, “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” This book means to be funny, but it’s about China, currently one of the least funny places on earth. It’s not a period piece, but it is badly dated. Much of its charm is derived from a heroine who seems modeled on Ann Coulter. Much of its hilarity comes from contemplating how to kill off the Dalai Lama and what to do with his corpse.

Patricia Wall/The New York Times

THEY EAT PUPPIES, DON’T THEY?

By Christopher Buckley

335 pages. Twelve. $25.99.

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This time Mr. Buckley, that reliable source of superbly erudite chuckles, seems to have been body-snatched by a snobbish and lazy twin. It seems impossible that the sly boots behind “Thank You for Smoking” could write dialogue like “Helen Keller could connect those dots” or “They’re more nervous about China than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

To be fair, Mr. Buckley’s vocabularic gifts remain consummate, especially when it comes to elegant Latin versions of less elegant English lingo. So perhaps the problem lies with his decision to depict Sino-American relations as creakily hostile. There are characters in “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” who regret the winning of the cold war, and they don’t entirely seem to be joking.

The book’s main character is Bird McIntyre, a defense industry lobbyist who cooks up ultra-virile, ultra-bad adventure novels in his Walter Mittyesque imagination. Lobbyist? Bad writing? The heart soars at such prospects from Mr. Buckley, and at his dependably anthropological grasp of Washington manners. (“Perception problem,” the book points out, is “Washington-speak for ‘reality.’ ”)

It also helps that Bird works for a company — called Groepping-Sprunt, thanks to Mr. Buckley’s rare gift for dreaming up credibly ludicrous names — that could better its fortunes by secretly stirring up trouble.

“Not since the end of the cold war had so many military been given the heave-ho,” Mr. Buckley writes, adding that the pensioning off of admirals and generals adds up to “an aggregate of over 300 stars so far.” International hostilities could provide a shot in the arm to the missile business, whatever the collateral damage that comes with it, though nobody in the book is saying, à la “Dr. Strangelove,” that we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.

Still, “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” acknowledges its obvious debt to “Strangelove” for plot inspiration.

The story connects Bird with one of America’s most bellicose political showboats, Angel Templeton, the long-legged, outlandishly flirty head of something called the Institute for Continuing Conflict. (There’s another of Mr. Buckley’s inspired strokes of nomenclature.)

Angel dresses like a dominatrix and writes books with titles like “The Case for Preemptive War: Taking the ‘Re-’ Out of Retaliation.” She likes to pick fights on political talk shows and has lots of enemies, like the grieving military mothers who throw their offspring’s Purple Hearts at her.

“You know you’re doing your job when they have to bring you in through the basement,” she says on her way into a television studio.

Mr. Buckley’s previous book was “Losing Mum and Pup,” a nonfiction account of how he weathered the deaths of his parents, William F. Buckley and Patricia Taylor Buckley. In light of that, it’s hard to know what to make of the fact that Angel Templeton sounds oddly like his father, speaking of “the dewy-eyed freshmen in the cushy groves of academe” and using words like “persiflage” in casual conversation.

Even weirder is that Comrade President Fa Mengyao, president of the People’s Republic of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has nightmares about seeing the face of his dead father on a dumpling that Fa has, to his horror, devoured.

This novel’s main har-har involves the way Bird and Angel elevate a minor news report about the Dalai Lama into American suspicions that the Chinese are trying to kill the man Bird calls “a 75-year-old sweetie pie with glasses, plus the sandals and the saffron robe and the hugging and the mandalas and the peace and harmony and the reincarnation and nirvana. All that. We can’t get enough of him.”

Meanwhile, China’s leaders are so old school that they are free of the headline-making dissidents and corruption scandals that plague them today. They behave like pure totalitarian stereotypes, scheme about the Dalai Lama and make laughable mistakes about American culture. They think this country’s best-known humor show is called “Saturday Night Liver.”

The Chinese aspects of “They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” are disappointing. Mr. Buckley’s satirical insights about American-Chinese relations were worth looking forward to, but they will have to stay that way.

The most hackneyed parts of this book are those depicting Bird as the henpecked husband of an ambitious horsewoman named Myndi, who wants him to pay for expensive animals so that she can qualify for the United States Equestrian Team. Not much could be more trite than Bird’s using “Ride of the Valkyries” as his ringtone for Myndi when she calls.

“They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?” is an oddball title for this book. It will make some readers mindful of Chinese consumption of dog meat. But it also recalls the 1969 film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” what with Myndi and her hobby. When a McIntyre horse develops an injured tendon, Bird finds himself “fantasizing about dog food factories and the excellent work they do.”

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