Newsnight Review discussed Christopher Buckley's novel No Way To Treat A First Lady.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, the basic joke here is we have to imagine that Hillary had actually killed Bill because of Monica. Is it a good joke?

TOM PAULIN:
It's not a good joke. It has a very clever opening sentence, this novel, but it's coarse, vulgar, disgusting, of no importance whatsoever. Where it issues from is that old-style American Republicanism. Not the caring conservatism that they supposedly represent now, in which anti-Semitism was an important ingredient. It's there right throughout this novel, even down to the lawyer Crudman, some big Jewish lawyer he has a beef against.

MARK LAWSON:
We are guessing it's Alan Dershowitz.

TOM PAULIN:
It's complacent, smug, hard-nosed, it's worthless. It will make a cheap film that people will go and see.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought it was very funny. It is an anti-Clinton book, but in the end it's really anti-lawyer. That's the main target.

IAN RANKIN:
Yes, but in a softly-softly way really. The good guy is a lawyer, the bad guys are lawyers and the funny guys are lawyers. They are larger than life. They live life in a huge, gargantuan way. There is one sentence in it, "he was a small guy but demanded big limos". You get the sense of the egotism that's there all the time. The media is very important to them. I did laugh out loud, I thought it was an extremely funny book. I am a big fan of West Wing. This took it one stage further. I am no fan of law novels, the Grishams and so on, but all the time in the court room I was fascinated by it. There is a nice quote from Tom Woolf on the front. You could see Tom Woolf using the same material in a hugely inflated way without making many more points made in this slim book.

NATASHA WALTER:
The satire never became savage enough. In the end, he is too soft, too much in love with the world he is trying to satirise. He lets the characters off in the end. I think he is too kind to them. You don't like the way he treated Jews. I didn't like the way he treated women.

TOM PAULIN:
They are always to be told what to do.

NATASHA WALKER:
They're always trying to get into the powerful men's pants.

MARK LAWSON:
But he is nasty to almost everyone - satire is always reactionary, isn't it?

NATASHA WALTER:
I felt there was something rather yucky about the way he dealt with the women. There is something horrible in the way he treats the women which isn't there in the way he treats the men. He is always wanting to describe their underwear. I just found it deeply off-putting.

TOM PAULIN:
"The lovely, sexy sway of her bottom" is about the height of his prose, I think.

MARK LAWSON:
The nearest English equivalent would be Ben Elton I think who tends to take these public stories like Big Brother and satirise them. But this is much less savage. He uses the word "copulation" because the other word would offend the American audience.

IAN RANKIN:
There's not a lot of swearing. It's a rude book without being sweary. I think it's because he's an insider. He is the editor of a large-scale magazine with lots of access to these people, meeting them at parties probably. He wants to push them a little bit without sort of rattling their cage too much. Maybe that's a slight downfall. Others would go for the jugular and grip on to it.

TOM PAULIN:
He wants to reassure the men that even a Hillary Clinton figure will take advice from a brilliant male lawyer.

MARK LAWSON:
I enjoy the way he uses Washington gossip.

IAN RANKIN:
It's a lovely book if you have any information on what's been happening in America in the past ten years. You will get different things from different levels of the book. A lot of people could read this book and enjoy it without knowing the Barbara Streisand-Clinton connection or the rumours of it, I should say. I liked the idea of getting beneath the surface of what you see, when you see it on Court TV.