Wry Martinis.

AT THE end of our phone call I asked the genial fellow who assigns book reviews for NR if Christopher Buckley was in any way related to the illustrious founder of the magazine. "Oh, he's his son," came the reply. I then jokingly asked if that meant I had to give the book a good review. There was a silence and then what sounded like a harrumph before my interlocutor hung up.

Glowing with the integrity for which book reviewers are famous, I resolved to read the book over the weekend and, if it was no good, to return it to the editor claiming that I had injured both wrists in a snowboarding accident. But I couldn't help wondering why anyone willingly writes book reviews. They pay very little for a great deal of work, and you run the risk of either making powerful enemies or earning a reputation as a logroller and a suck-up.

Fortunately, Wry Martinis turned out to be one of those rare assignments that make being a book reviewer seem like less of a raw deal. I chortled so loudly on the subway that a crowd of puffy-jacketed, baggy-jeaned teenagers moved to the other end of the car. I had read Christopher Buckley's stuff in The New Yorker and decided he was rather hit-and-miss. But this ten-year collection reveals a satirist at the top of his form, the best of the baby-boomer humorists.

To be funny in the way that Buckley is requires more than literary talent and good comic timing. You have to care about things. But not care so much that your sense of humor fails. This is one reason why you rarely see anything really funny in, say, The Nation or The Weekly Standard, especially when such magazines are trying their hardest to be satirical.

Buckley is a Republican but, like P. J. O'Rourke, not an orthodox one. Indeed, he is not an orthodox anything. This is why conservative true believers feel uneasy about him -- in the same way that liberal true believers have their doubts about Garry Trudeau. Buckley's imagined "three-martini debate" between Clinton and Bush (published in The New Yorker) is hilarious, a classic of its kind. But a hard-core partisan wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation to give one candidate all the good lines, or to make him sober while the other one collapsed.

In fact, unpredictability and variety are Christopher Buckley's hallmarks. This collection includes interviews with his mother and with Ann Landers, and mock letters to Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber suspect, from counselors Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and Gerry Spence. Then there are the personal essays. My favorites were the ones in which Buckley described the joys of pulling nine Gs in an F-16 -- he threw up only five times -- and his disastrously expensive efforts to air-condition his Washington, D.C., study. But Buckley is best at pure satire -- like his wonderful spoof of the New York Times best-seller list and the transcript of phone sex between the Prince of Wales and his mistress which hints at an unusual use for Marmite, the infamous English sandwich spread.

Buckley has a soft spot for the military and feels guilty about not going to Vietnam though he genuinely failed the physical. But this doesn't stop him from making deliciously cruel fun of Tom Clancy and his techno-thrillers. Nor does his Republicanism make him unwilling to skewer Big Business. When a tobacco-company flack defends her work to him, he comes back with, "Of course: the Yuppie Nuremberg defense: I vas only paying ze mortgage." And some airlines' decision to circulate less fresh air into airplane cabins inspires him to draft a memorandum suggesting that more money be saved by "adding a mixture of sawdust and polyethylene foam to the food." In his imaginary focus groups "it was determined that only 3 per cent noticed they were eating wood and plastic instead of the standard fare."

Satirical humor flows from anger in the defense of something the writer thinks is important. What gives satire its force is its implicit ideas of the way the world should be. Buckley's targets are therefore a pretty good guide to his values, literary as well as moral and political. Like Orwell, he particularly detests the despoliation of language by hucksters or politicians or those who would make the Bible more politically correct. And Buckley is well placed to hurl linguistic thunderbolts; his own writing is never anything but gin clear.

In the introduction to Wry Martinis, Buckley worries about the title. But I can assure the reader that it is spot-on. These pieces are dry, sharp, and smooth, and once you've had one you need another right away.