I am not sure why I feel compelled to note every new review of Dog Days, but once you get started it is hard to know when to stop.
If Christopher Buckley gave Wonkette’s blovel a thumbs up, P.J. O’Rourke is a definite thumbs down. Writing in the Washington Post O’Rourke skewers Dog Days while giving Cox the occasional compliment:
I won’t spoil the plot. There isn’t one. A minor cipher on the “Hillman for President” communications staff — a ciphette, if you will — is having an affair you’ll care nothing about with a major cipher of a media type who’s married to nobody we ever meet. The ciphette has a nugatory friendship with a hollow career gal possessed of no character or inner life. Through circumstances too simple for explanation, a naught of a naughty barmaid comes (pun not intended but typical of those in the book) between this, that and the other goose egg. It doesn’t add up to much.
[. . .]
Dog Days is devoid of ideas or even references to ideas, thus giving an accurate picture of practical politics at campaign time, as if anyone needed this. The people in Dog Days expend so much energy on instant-messaging, text-messaging, message-forwarding and such that it’s no wonder they are too exhausted to have anything to say. In place of dialogue, Cox introduces chunks and lumps of interchanges just as they appear on LED screens. The result is a convincing argument that electronics provide a mode of expression falling between graffiti tags and gerbil squeaks.
So who do you trust O’Rourke or Buckley? Of course, if you kind folks helped me get to New York, I could ask Mr. Buckley myself . . .
