LITTLE GREEN MEN

Buckley fils’s fourth comic novel (following the riotous Thank You for Smoking, 1994) once again eviscerates contemporary economic-political phenomena, this time in the twin forms of a complacent TV talk-show host and of a secretive government agency that fakes alien abductions to encourage popular support for funding space exploration and Pentagon overkill. When Washington notable John Oliver Banion is kidnaped by the eponymous nonearthlings (who are in fact cheesily garbed operatives of “MJ-12”), he believes, and spreads the gospel of extraterrestrial visitation among his devoted viewers, with imaginative and timely mock-catastrophic consequences. Buckley’s eye for paramilitary and media-driven nonsense remains keen, and the book hums with hilarious one-liners. But neither the embattled Banion nor any of its lesser personalities remotely resembles a developed character. The dizzily mixed result isn’t much of a novel, though it’s a highly amusing and likable entertainment. (Book-of-the- Month/QPB selections)