clipped from www.thestar.com

The career of Christopher Buckley has long since passed the point where reference to his being the son of conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. is obligatory. As the author of 11 books laced with satire, including the bestseller Thank You for Smoking, and a comic essayist frequently appearing in the pages of The New Yorker, Christopher Buckley has made his bones.

Prior to Boomsday, his latest, I had never read a Buckley novel. This seemed a good place to start. I am a Baby Boomer myself, naturally interested in the novel's plot. That plot is set in the United States three or four years hence, when the first wave of Baby Boomer retirement signals the onset of a "perfect economic storm."

The novel's heroine, Cassandra Devine, broods on the reality of "mountainous debt, a deflating economy, and seventy-seven million people retiring." Who is going to pay to get the country out of this storm? Her generation, the under-30s, that's who.