Amazon.com Review
In Christopher Buckley's hilarious fourth novel, Washington, D.C., is naturally enough a place of sex, lies, and videotape. Unfortunately for
Little Green Men's pundit protagonist, John Oliver Banion, it is also the HQ of Majestic Twelve, a very, very covert government project. Since "that golden Cold War summer of 1947," MJ-12 has had a single mission--to convince taxpayers that space invaders are constantly lurking below what's left of the ozone layer. "A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs," the author thoughtfully explains.
But one disgruntled operative wants out. Nathan Scrubbs is fed up to the back teeth with the art of alien abduction--not to mention his cover as a Social Security flunky--so when his request for a transfer is quashed, he drunkenly decides to take it out on ubiquitous ultra-prig Banion, who happens to be on TV at the time. The ensuing high-tech kidnap, at Maryland's Burning Bush Country Club, is only one of the thousands of convulsively funny scenes in Little Green Men. Not that the novel isn't a skewed morality play of some sort: as Banion comes to believe in Tall Nordics and Short Ugly Grays, he is quickly removed from every A-list in town. But oddly enough, social and political disaster turns out to be as liberating as the finest alien probe. Let's just say that long before Banion and Scrubbs have a close encounter at the Millennium Man March on Washington, this Beltway barrel of monkeys attains a truly extraplanetary level of amusement. --Kerry Fried
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Celebrity trials, populist bile and The X-Files get the Buckley (God Is My Broker; Thank You for Smoking) skewer in this fast-paced satire. John O. Banion is an acerbic journalist, a talk-show host, a D.C. insider?and proud of it. MJ-12 is a secret federal program (based on a real-life program of the same name) that stages alien abductions to maintain popular support for military spending and space exploration. When he is "probed" by "aliens" at a golf course, Banion becomes a true believer in UFOs. Ostracized by the D.C. establishment, he uses his TV show to organize millions of UFO cultists (the "Millennium Men"), who gather on the Mall (the "Millennium Man March") and just may bring down the government. Consistently hilarious and painfully topical, the novel can resemble a series of stand-up comedy routines; it's dense with one-liners, inside jokes, mini-exposes and tangential riffs on peripheral characters, from FBI men to Larry King. But Buckley's plot is no drawing-room farce: he envisions national catastrophes, convergences of millions of people, the stuff of big-budget disaster movies and spy thrillers. His wit-above-all style combines with his ambitious plot to flatten his characters: the few sympathetic relationships?between a refugee secret agent and his down-home fisherman protector, or between Banion and a sexy UFO crusader?seem out of place, little lumps of feeling in an otherwise smooth, cool gelatin of extended banter. By the time the climactic courtroom scenes have tied up the subplots, the novel seems both hurried and cluttered: half monologue, half screenplay. Buckley delivers the irreverent comedy his fans are looking for, but those seeking more complexity from their political fiction, or more three-dimensional characters, may feel, well, alienated. Agent, Amanda Urban. BOMC selection; film rights sold to New Line Cinema; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
