Mum and Pup, dearest

Oh boy, William F. Buckley Jr. must be rolling in his Sharon, Conn., grave.

First, there's the annoyance that he's actually buried in a coffin, when his instructions were to have his ashes commingled with those of his wife, Patricia Taylor Buckley, in a sculptural bronze cross on his Stamford, Conn., lawn.

Second, his only son, Christopher, came out in a Daily Beast column this past fall with, "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama" - a defection that led to his readily accepted resignation from the National Review, the conservative magazine his father started in 1955 and for which dad wrote 5,600 columns.

And, last but certainly not least, there's "Losing Mum and Pup," a fond but hardly reverent portrait by the son of his famous parents in decline.

Before his Obama endorsement, Christopher Buckley was best known for his satirical novels, including "Thank You For Smoking," "Supreme Courtship," and "Boomsday," which proposed mass suicide by aging boomers to save Social Security from fiscal ruin. Despite "Boomsday's" success, Buckley père, increasingly critical with age, e-mailed his son, "This one didn't work for me. Sorry."

"Losing Mum and Pup" surely wouldn't work for the old man, either. But, as Buckley notes, after deciding on the Sharon, Conn., burial, "though this wasn't at all what Pup had specified . . . I felt - for the first time in my life - entirely independent of paternal authority or rebuke." Clearly it's a liberating feeling.

Buckley explains that after losing both parents within a year and finding himself orphaned at 55, he decided to write a book about them despite his compunctions because "I'm a writer, for better or worse, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it seems either a waste or a conscious act of evasion."

Although it has its moving moments, don't expect anything with the resonance of Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" or Calvin Trillin's "About Alice." Buckley's default mode is parody - he describes himself as "someone who makes raspberries at the cosmos" - and he rarely resists a quip.

Buckley nails his parents in two lively portraits. Patricia, tall, regal, formidable, always exquisitely dressed and a consummate hostess, was "a kind of den mother to the conservative movement" whose husband of 57 years was her full-time job.

She was also prone to "serial misbehavior" and "whoppers that would make Pinocchio look button-nosed," her son writes. He frequently railed against her, and they went stretches without speaking to each other. "Why, I wondered now, had I never accepted the futility of hurling myself against Fortress Mum?" he asks.

WFB, "the Lion of the Right," wrote columns in a matter of minutes and books - 56 in all - during winters in Switzerland. His admiring son comments that he was a great man who worked hard and played hard, taking risks at every turn - including flying solo after a mere 90 minutes of cockpit time, and sailing in howling northeasters. "Great men are not dawdlers; their idle is set too high," Buckley writes at one point.

But father and son often locked "theological antlers." William was a devout Catholic, while his son is agnostic. Buckley notes, "Our Sturmiest and Drangiest times were over religion. . . . his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of (to use his term) impiety." Buckley does not mention whether his out-of-wedlock son (who became tabloid fodder) was an additional source of friction with his parents.

William's decline was precipitous after the death of his wife in April 2007. Although he continued to work - on memoirs about his friendships with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan - he needed to be chauffeured the 50 yards to his garage study.

Like his wife, William was a lifelong smoker, but of cigars. As his diabetes and emphysema progressed, he self-medicated with a "daily intake of pills [that] would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause." He was so miserable that he spoke of suicide, a fact that Buckley says he kept out of The New York Times through some eyebrow-raising veiled threats to his father's biographer, a Times editor, about limiting access to archives. At any rate, William died of heart failure at his desk in February 2008.

Much - indeed, too much - of Buckley's memoir is about his proud efforts to send his parents off in the style to which they were accustomed. This resulted in two lavish memorials: a party for 500 guests at the Metropolitan Museum's Temple of Dendur to honor his mother, and a dazzling service at St. Patrick's Cathedral for his father, with Henry Kissinger eulogizing both. Buckley relishes all of the boldfaced names, though he can't let go of Senator John McCain's insulting absence. One can't help but wonder whether this factored into his November defection.

Buckley's most sobering observation, albeit, wittily conveyed, is the "realization that you're next. With the death of the second parent, one steps - or is not-so-gently nudged - across the threshold into the Green Room of the river Styx." Cause for concern, especially if you have a parodist for a son.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for newspapers.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a review Sunday of Christopher Buckley's book "Losing Mum and Pup" tied his father, the late William F. Buckley, to the wrong magazine. Buckley founded and wrote for the National Review.