SOURCE: Tavcar, Larry. “Smoke and Mirrors.” Public Relations Quarterly 39, no. 2 (summer 1994): 3-4.

In the following review, Tavcar examines Thank You for Smoking in relation to the American public relations industry, noting the critical response to the novel.

“Why do you do this? What motivates you?”

Nick Naylor confronts those questions about a third of the way into Christopher Buckley's satirical novel, Thank You for Smoking, published in May. Naylor, the novel's “hero,” is chief spokesman (“smokesman”) of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It's 1990, and Naylor is being interviewed by a reporter from the conservative Washington Moon after a stellar performance defending the tobacco industry on “Larry King Live.”

“You want to know why I really do it?” Naylor, 40, lapsed Catholic, divorced, responds. “To pay the mortgage” [on the house his former wife occupies]—and tuition to St. Euthanasius for his 12-year-old son.

“It's a kind of yuppie Nuremberg...