To hear Christopher Buckley tell it, a surefire way of knowing he has a new book out is to check the headlines — for a huge, unrelated news story that fills acres of newsprint and eats up hours of television time.
Before dismissing Buckley as a just another paranoid author, consider that the economic meltdown bumped him from a round of talk shows where he planned to promote his latest political satire, “Supreme Courtship.”
The 55-year-old son of conservative icon William F. Buckley jocularly ticks off other occasions when real life distracted attention from his skewerings of Washington political life.
“When my book ‘Thank You For Smoking’ [came out], O.J. was happening. I was supposed to be interviewed on ‘The Today Show’ [about ‘Little Green Men’] when Columbine happened,” sighs Buckley, by way of mock complaint.
“Maybe I ought not write books,” he muses with a smile. “It would probably be better for the universe.”
But it would be decidedly worse for those who enjoy Buckley’s wry send-ups of American politics. From “The White House Mess” (1986), a faux memoir of a fumbling Democratic presidency, to “Thank You For Smoking” (1994) with its tobacco lobbyist hero, to “No Way To Treat A First Lady” (2002), which put the president’s wife on trial for his murder-by-brass-spittoon, Buckley’s bestsellers have earned him the admiration of many — including author Tom Wolfe, who has called him “one of the funniest writers in the English language.”
“His e-mail and voice-mail messages,” says his longtime editor, Jonathan Karp, via e-mail, “are frequently funnier than most late-night TV comedy monologues.” New York Times columnist John Tierney, a friend of Buckley’s since college, believes he’s “at his peak with [“Supreme Courtship”]. As a reviewer once said, he’s like the Balzac of Washington.”
But readers will soon be seeing a different Buckley. “Losing Mum and Pup,” a memoir about the deaths of his parents within a year of one another, will be published next May. Coming to grips with their passing inspired a book that Buckley says “literally poured out of me” in just 40 days, and led him to think seriously about other literary genres.
“I think I’m going to give the fiction a rest for a while,” says Buckley. “Writing this book about my mother and father, I found I was using different receptors. And it felt good.”
In fact, Buckley’s first book, published in 1983, was a nonfiction work titled “Steaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter,” an often hilarious remembrance of a ribald stint in the Merchant Marines when he was in his 20s. “I like nonfiction. I mostly read nonfiction,” he says. “But I just … for various reasons, seem to have a hard time coming up with a good idea.”
The prospect of Buckley switching gears doesn’t bother Karp, who began his partnership with Buckley by editing “Thank You For Smoking.” “I’m sure he’ll write all kinds of books, fiction and nonfiction,” Karp says, “and that each one will be entertaining.”
The idea for “Losing Mum and Pup” occurred shortly after William F. Buckley’s death, at age 80, last February. Following his father’s star-studded memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, at which he and Henry Kissinger delivered eulogies, Buckley threw himself into writing, following a favorite WFB dictum: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”
“Losing one’s parents is an eventful thing. And I’m a boomer. We’re getting older, and a lot of us are going to be going through this,” he says. “And there’s a fourth aspect, which was that it was cathartic.”
Yet the catharsis is unlikely to end the incessant comparisons of son to father. Buckley bears an unmistakable resemblance to his late parent, and there are clear echoes in his speech of the familiar familial eloquence. And, of course, both men used a talent for writing to become public figures.
However, Buckley’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama for president — a move that drew the ire of some conservatives — is only the latest example of the ways in which Christopher is not, and never has been, a carbon copy of his father.
Unlike William F. Buckley, who was a devout Catholic, his son professes to have “misplaced” his faith. While the elder Buckley “was too sharp-eyed to ever become too doctrinaire” in the conservatism he helped popularize, Christopher Buckley is even less so, skewering targets on both left and right with equal gusto.
And though his father often wrote books that his son remembers admiringly as “highbrow intellectual stuff,” Christopher Buckley has made his name through a sharp but surprisingly gentle brand of satire.
“He’s never mean, but he does occasionally convey the anger many of us feel about the ways of Washington. Writers have to be true to their personalities,” Karp says. “He is naturally gleeful, irreverent, ironic, sophisticated, thoughtful and self-deprecating, so his books reflect that sensibility. He is bemused by the absurdities of Washington, and his books capture the hypocrisy and egomania of that world.”
Buckley’s father never showed much enthusiasm for his son’s satirical works. He dismissed the 2007 novel “Boomsday,” about a radical plan to save Social Security, in the postscript of an e-mail: “Sorry, this one didn’t work for me.”
“Either he didn’t get the books, or something else was going on. And you can kind of fill in the middle,” Buckley offers. “He was very supportive at the beginning of my career. But for whatever reason … that sort of wore off. It actually became kind of funny, really.
“He was a very supportive dad, but he was a very rigorous grader,” Buckley adds, after a pause. “If he didn’t like something, he said so. He did that with everyone. And I think his criticism could sometimes have a certain sting … but that made his praise, when it came, all the weightier.”
Buckley chuckles at a question about what his children — 20-year-old Caitlin and 16-year-old Conor — think of his work. “Put it this way: At their age, they’re about as interested in my books as I was, at their age, in my dad’s books.
“I remember my dad sending me a letter at one point saying, ‘You know what I want for my birthday? I want you to read just one of my books,’ ” he adds with a laugh. “I think I pretended to read ‘The Unmaking of a Mayor.’ So there’ll probably come a time when they’ll pull one of [my] books down and say, ‘What the f— is this about?’”
Though he concedes that writing satire can be analogous, in the eyes of some, to “sitting at the children’s table,” Buckley is reluctant to leave fiction behind. “I enjoy writing the novels. When you’re in the middle of a book, it becomes pleasantly obsessive. It’s like every time you sit down, you open a door and go into a sort of walled garden.”
As for writing in general, Buckley says “it’s a way of sort of paying your rent in the universe.”
“My dad used to say to me, jokingly, when I was young, ‘What have you done today for the good of your soul?’
“For which,” he adds with a laugh, “I never had a very good answer.”
