BOOKS: Hotfoot

Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley Jr., has had some good breaks during his lifetime, but how lucky can you get? Thank You for Smoking (Random House; 272 pages; $22), the hotfoot Buckley has given the tobacco industry, went on sale at the same time as a nationally televised congressional hearing was making American cigarette makers look like drug dealers.

Buckley's tobacco peddlers come off no better morally than their subpoenaed real-life counterparts, but they do have more charm. In contrast, the book's politicians and anti-smoking crusaders are boorish. Readers will feel superior as they chortle through Buckley's gallery of rotters and Puritans. The hero is Nick Naylor, spokesman for the "Academy of Tobacco Studies," the industry's lobby. He is a former journalist who was fired because he once mistakenly reported the assassination of a U.S. President.

The superior goofball plot, raffish cast and zany sex scenes (a critical test for a humorist) make this the funniest of Buckley's books. The style alternates between Saturday Night Live and Raymond Chandler: "A tsunami-sized wave of nausea rolled through him. Nick's eyes went groggily back to Monmaney, who was peering at him without sympathy. Yes, a real killer, this one, looked like he flossed with piano wire."

That bit of mock hard-boiled dialogue follows an episode in which Naylor is kidnapped and covered with nicotine patches. Who did it and why are questions that keep getting lost as Buckley pursues the runaway possibilities of his rich and touchy subject. But the minor mystery that keeps the plot perking is not hard to figure out: the villains can be spotted by their unawareness of their own flawed nature and a telltale need to take themselves seriously.