Kirkus Reviews QR Code
HAS ANYONE SEEN MY TOES? by Christopher Buckley Kirkus Star

HAS ANYONE SEEN MY TOES?

by Christopher Buckley

Pub Date: Sept. 6th, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9804-6
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Humorist Buckley looks at one man’s increasingly strange behavior during the pandemic.

In a South Carolina coastal town, a screenwriter confronts the bathroom scale after a year of pandemic overeating. His belly blocks any view of his toes; thus the title. He tells his agent, “I’ve put on so much weight people are calling me Bubba the Hutt.” And when his prescribed appetite suppressants don’t keep him from ordering burger combos at the Hippo King takeout window, his doctor adds another pill. Soon he finds ideas starting to flow for a movie about a Nazi plot to kidnap FDR from Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate. At the same time, he somehow gets involved in the local election for coroner. He’s not sure how, because he has been easily distracted in recent days and slips into odd fantasies or down rabbit holes doing impulsive web research. And he’s starting to forget things. Buckley delights in exploring the intersections of plausible and absurd as they arise in an off-kilter mind that resembles the author’s for all its allusive gymnastics and silliness. The minisaga of his hero’s stumbling into local politics via the coroner’s election—it appears Putin is interfering in the race—resonates with memories of the movie The Russians Are Coming, while an ancient ruse of Hannibal’s becomes a stampede of flaming feral Hungarian pigs in the Nazi screenplay. All this brings our hero to a point where he is sitting on a beach, naked but for a string of sausages wrapped around his torso, “hoping that baby turtles don’t hatch and mistake our testicles for turtle num-nums.”

This is Buckley at his comic, mischievous best.