I just finished reading Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel
Thank You for Smoking, and had quite a pleasant time doing so.
Given my
previous post about what I was reading, I suspect that my partaking of this novel will come as little surprise to anyone perusing this thread. Buckley's novel is peppered with all sorts of interesting facts about tobacco products, sprinkled here and there throughout the narrative as interesting asides, and I can't help but think that it was impressive that he found all of those from back when the World Wide Web was barely a year old.
As it was, I picked this title up based solely on the strength of the
2005 film of the same name, having enjoyed that movie quite a bit. Since the rule about the book always being better is (in my experience) true something like 95% of the time (though those 5% tend to be
quite notable), this seemed like a surefire bet.
And indeed it was, though the differences between the book and the film were—once the groundwork for each had been established—more pronounced than I expected.
Without going too deep into the plot of each (the Wikipedia pages already do that), what we have here is the story of a tobacco lobbyist and expert spin doctor named Nick Naylor who, after being kidnapped and nearly killed (via the application of several dozen nicotine patches) sees his life fall apart as certain nefarious individuals try to ruin him for their own ends. What's different is who the villain is, the manner in which Nick retaliates, and what eventually becomes of him.
In the film, Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart) is a guy who, before his fall from grace, comes across as unflappable due to his savant-like ability to take what should be untenable positions in the public debate (i.e. defending tobacco) and somehow managing to win each public engagement in which he participates. Moreover, he
knows he's just that good, and revels in it, having no real ideological or political attachments to tobacco but seeming to enjoy how he can dominate in a career field that by all rights should have chewed him up and spit him out.
By contrast, the book's version of Naylor is likewise not particularly enamored of tobacco, but takes to his job with far less swagger. A recurring theme of the book is his exasperation, not so much with the vast array of anti-smoking advocates that he has to deal with, but their sheer viciousness (even though he very often wins engagements by turning that against them, outraging them to the point of incoherence in full view of the public). Whereas Eckhart's Naylor is the very essence of "slick," Buckley's Naylor feels like he's struggling to avoid burning out (no pun intended).
While there are several differences in how important several characters are (for instance, in the film Naylor's son is a major secondary character, whereas in the book he's barely present), the most notable change is in the moral arc that Naylor goes through. I'll try and avoid spoilers by saying that, in the book, the story is ultimately a redemptive tale, as Naylor eventually decides to take revenge not only against the people behind his kidnapping, but on the industry which he previously championed.
The film's Naylor, by contrast, undergoes a far less salubrious transformation, albeit a more nuanced one. As laid down in the now-famous
"ice cream politics" scene from the film (with its message that you
should publicly argue with people whom you disagree with, so long as you can make them look bad), Eckhart's Naylor ultimately embraces his love of spin-doctoring, divorcing it from any particular enterprise. In that regard, his transformation goes from being immoral to being amoral, leaving viewers to decide whether or not that's any kind of improvement.
It's in that spirit that I'll conclude by noting how, as with so many things, there's a gaming-related aspect to this, albeit only in theme, as it's not hard to see WotC's ex-President
Cynthia Williams as our own version of Naylor...though I'd say she's more the film version than the novel.
