Flashback 2009: 'Losing Mum and Pup' is frank and funny

The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

    A long, busy weekend in New York City. Much fun, running around — lunch with a writer pal at the Century Association, a visit to the Treasures room at the New York Public Library, lunch at abcV, dinner at the Thai Diner, cheesecake at Caffe Reggio. Strolling Central Park AND the West Village AND the South Street Seaport and the reason we went here in the first place, a lovely wedding of a friend's son in Brooklyn.

     Monday morning we had a few hours free and headed to the Met, popping in on the Temple of Dendur. A small 2,000 shrine to the sons of a Nubian leader shouldn't be affected by a contemporary American humor writer. But I can never see the place and not think about Christopher Buckley. I don't believe I've ever shared that column here — let's fix that.

      Our parents leave us with a puzzle. If we're lucky, it's a simple, move-the-stack-of-discs-from-one-peg-to-another kind of puzzle we can solve with a little effort and then feel darn good about ourselves. Clever children.
     If we're not lucky, it's one of those jangly metal messes of bent nails and twisted loops, something we struggle over for the rest of our lives, flinging it aside in frustration only to pick it up again and again, determined to figure the thing out, somehow.
     And when our parents die, all hope of help is gone — no chance of anyone taking the jumble from our hands and saying, "Oh here, you do it like this . . . " A quandary millions of Baby Boomers are experiencing, and Christopher Buckley has done us a service by setting aside his usual job — crafting comic novels — to chronicle a grim period in 2007 and 2008 when his parents, conservative ringmaster William F. Buckley Jr. and New York socialite Patricia Taylor Buckley, both died.
     The book was published last week and its title — Losing Mum and Pup —hints at what Buckley has accomplished. I winced when I first heard it, chatting with him last September about his recent novel, Supreme Courtship. Rich people, writing frankly about their lives of privilege will, unless they are very careful, end up sounding like Thurston Howell III complaining about his daiquiri. The words "mum and pup" give off a tennis-anyone? tang of the snobbery that smoothed every polished river pebble syllable spoken by William F. Buckley. My affection for him being what it is — nonexistent — I worried that his son, one of the few contemporary novelists I really like, was about to veer off the path.
     My worry was misplaced. Christopher Buckley is so frank, so funny, that all class envy is defused. One forgives him his Swiss boarding school and yacht parties as he struggles to send off his difficult parents, who weren't always there when he needed them, but certainly are here now. After his mother's death, he keeps his ailing, channel-surfing father company. He writes:
     "I was supposed to leave mid-July on a long-planned trip to California. One night as we watched the first of three — or was it four? — movies, he said apprehensively, 'When are you leaving for California?'
     " 'I'm not, Pup, I'm going to stay here with you.'
     "He began to cry. I went over and patted him on the back. He recovered his composure and said somewhat matter-of-factly, 'Well, I'd do the same for you.' "
     "I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn't. A year or two ago, I might have said it out loud, initiating one of our antler clashes. But watching him suffer had made my lingering resentments seem trivial and beside the point."
     Either that moment sends you bolting for the bookstore, or you've been bequeathed the puzzle page from Highlights and don't know it. Not being a fan of his father's, I wasn't offended, as some conservatives were, by Buckley's depictions of humiliating medical problems and agonizing hospital scenes. Certain details do stagger — his mother's memorial service is held at the Temple of Dendur, the Nubian temple rebuilt inside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bill for the event's audio/visual salute comes to $20,000, a detail Buckley delivers as farce:
     "The audiovisual subcontractor, a competent and agreeable man named Tony, presented his estimate. I whistled silently at the $7,000 price at the bottom of the e-mail, but I thought, Well, we're only going to do this once. A month later, my learning curve took a sharp turn upward when Tony presented his final bill and I realized that I hadn't read quite all the way to the bottom of his e-mail attachment. The $7,000 was for equipment. The labor cost came to an additional $13,000 on top of that. As I type this a year later, I'm able to chuckle — finally — at my ineptitude at e-mail attachment reading. I can hear Mum's ghost muttering, Twenty thousand dollars? For a few television screens and a microphone? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
     He hasn't. Buckley retains his wits and his wit — in several spots I laughed out loud, and found myself, for the first time, interested in William F. Buckley. I've never read anything by him; he was never exactly the hot author in my squishy liberal Democratic circle. But after I finished Losing Mum and Pup I felt compelled to trot off to the Northbrook Library and check out Right Reason.
     Our parents help us, then we help them. We begin as their dream, the poet said, then they become ours. Christopher Buckley has sketched his parents at their lowest, last moments and used the crisis to frame a portrait of their lives that is rich and alluring, heart-breaking and hysterical. It is filled with interesting tidbits — the Washington Monument is 555 feet high; Henry Kissinger cries easily — and practical advice: Don't smoke. If you're a veteran, make sure your family knows the location of your DD-214 certificate, proving your honorable service, if you want military honors at your funeral.
     And lastly, love pardons many sins. Buckley could have taken these same facts and written a version of Mommy Dearest if he didn't so obviously adore his parents, warts and all, a reminder that the love we give to our children is returned to us, if we are lucky, when we need it most.

    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 18, 2009