- Home
- About Us
- Contributors
- Departments
- Topics
- Back Issues
- Weekly Archives
- AmSpecBlog
- Subscribe
- Newsletter
- Advertise
- Donate
- Contact Us
- Daily Digest
- Templeton Essays
Among the Intellectualoids
The Strip Club
Naturally I was happy to learn that Christopher Buckley had just written a new novel, this one called Losing Mum and Pup—the story, I assumed, of a mute and careless veterinarian.
However, here I was completely wrong. Losing Mum and Pup, as it turns out, although nominally about the famous conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and his sociable socialite wife, Pat, is really about their son, Chris Buckley. Or as his father called him, Christo.
It is also about how he, Christo, suffered. Not simply because of the reasons that might immediately spring to mind on reading the book: after a few pops at the dinner table Pat Buckley was evidently so rude and offensive that Christo felt compelled to tell her—on her deathbed—“I forgive you” (a promise he instantly rescinds by rattling off practically every lousy thing “vinous” Pat ever did); autocratic Bill also offended by perpetually hogging the remote to the apparatus Christo likes to call “the telly.”
As becomes clear quickly enough, the reason young Buckley needed to write his memoir was that within a year of each other, both of his parents, figures who really are described in the book as “larger than life,” had the temerity to die. This, their wealthy only child observes, left him, at 55, “an orphan.” And he isn’t joking. The word “orphan” is repeated with such tireless frequency throughout the book that we can only be astonished he didn’t call it “The Story of O.” “Orphanhood,” the author explains on page three, is “one of the biggies, running through most of Melville, among others, and right down the middle of the great American novel Adventures of Huck Finn.” In other words, this isn’t some tell-all sleaze bucket of a book. It has a fine old literary lineage.
But I like to look at young Buckley’s book in another way. Namely as the latest entry in a certain modern genre: the youngest, spunkiest, and probably thinnest volume on the cramped shelf of rival confessional books. The spawn of Dickens and Oprah. I wish I could say I am amused or even repelled by the gusto with which the middle-aged children of this century share with the rest of the world the secrets of their flawed parents and their own errant selves. Or that I find something compelling or even singular in any of their portraits.
But the truth of it is—at heart, they’re all the same. Well written or ungrammatical, fleshy or spare, candid or cagey, they’re all the literary equivalent of the strip joint. Writers need not apply. I don’t, for instance, see a lot of difference between Pat Buckley, who, as Chris informs us, liked to produce whoppers for the unsuspecting by detailing imaginary visits paid to her ancestral Canadian home by the British royal family—and say, Jeannette Walls’s recollection in her memoir The Glass Castle of her own mother, a ragged, sometimes homeless indigent who devours chocolate bars under a ratty blanket while little Jeannette goes hungry. Upper-crust or without a crust, these ladies are two of a kind: Grendel moms to literary blabbermouths with smart laptops and itchy palms, and if you suspect a touch of hypersensitivity here, you betcha. What happened to Mum can happen to anyone.
Let us take stock of how this all came about. Personally, I place the blame squarely on Augusten Burroughs. In 2002, breathless and panting, his book, called Running with Scissors, emerged. It was about (tell me if I’ve left anything out here) the author’s bizarre mother who packs 12-year-old Augusten off to live with her peculiar shrink and the shrink’s homosexual son, who first sodomizes the teenage Burroughs and then forms a relationship with him; this ends only when Burroughs leaves the shrink’s family fold with the homosexual’s sister. Although Burroughs assured readers that every syllable of Running with Scissors was true, when a lawsuit threatened to slow its gait, the word “memoirs” vanished from the author’s notes.
In hot pursuit, one year later came A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a purported druggie memoir that packed a punch by flaunting more warts than Kermit. Misery, sinfulness, backsliding, redemption—these, as we all know, are the very elements a literary endeavor needs to get a big plug from Oprah. And, predictably, America’s most beloved television hostess not only made it a selection of her book club, but famously observed on her show that the work was “like nothing you’ve ever read before.” More to the point, as it turned out: it was like nothing the author had ever lived before.
Thanks to its Teutonic charm (all Frey nouns—be they Cop, Priest, Criminal, Hell, Nurse, Addict, Businessman, Entrance, Lawyer, or House—are first knighted with a capital and then drop-kicked into some very puzzling sentences), the book sold 2.4 million copies. Literary agents begged their authors to emulate its remarkable style. It was only when the investigative website thesmokinggun.com tried to find out whether anything in the book had actually occurred that things became, paradoxically, far less clear. Because Frey lied so consistently and effectively, we will, sadly, never really know for certain whether or not he kicked a Parisian priest in the groin a total of 15 times after the cleric grabbed his crotch. Or how many times in his life he vomited. Or whether or not some girl snorted coke off his, um…lap. Oprah was devastated. His publisher felt betrayed.
And yet, why? one wonders. What do any of us really care about any of this? Gospel or fictional, surely the point of all these narratives is not really their credibility but their buy-ability. Their terribility. The more abasing and revolting the ordeals, the more we love them—especially if all the misfortunes chronicled happened to be the writer’s own damn fault. And if, perchance, the author can’t quite make it to the big leagues—as say, Buckley fils, owing to his plump bank balance and fondness for accuracy, cannot—then it is up to him to unearth other means to compel our pity. Orphanhood, for instance. Or Pup’s disappearing act during college graduation. Or the e-mail in which Pup cruelly panned his kid’s latest novel. “Sorry,” was Pup’s last word. (I share his pain.)
In the years since the Frey disaster, certain confessional writers have wised up. David Carr, the journalist whose recently published The Night of the Gun bears the blue-ribbon subtitle “A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.” is probably the smartest of the bunch. Chronicling his own tale of addiction and recovery, and recognizing perhaps that we’ve heard this all before, the book launches forthrightly with the very issue Frey never troubled to address. Namely, who can trust the story of a cokehead written by a cokehead?
But within a paragraph the author attempts to right himself, arriving at the essential point of all stripper stories: “The meme of abasement followed by salvation is a durable device in literature…” Carr notes. “There was That Guy, a dynamo of hilarity and then misery, and there is This Guy, the one with a family, a house, and a good job as a reporter and columnist for the New York Times.”
Carr wants us to believe that connecting That Guy, the old sad, bad, drugged-to-the-gills Ur-Guy who starts the book, to This Guy, a new, improved, polished, and published version who touches down about a paragraph before the Acknowledgments, “will take a lot more than typing.”
But basically typing is all it takes. All that we ask of our literary strippers. Typing and hyping. Peeling and telling.
Comments
Leave a Comment
Kitty| 7.9.09 @ 7:00AM
This Oprah-ization of society is unseemly.
...
Steve| 7.9.09 @ 7:28AM
Buckley the Younger fairly screams self-absorbed, Baby Boom puke....One assumes that the only reason he did not self-destruct earlier was that Dear Old Dad kept him on the straight and narrow. Pitiful.
anon.| 7.9.09 @ 7:31AM
Such contrived, cutsie writing... makes one wanna puke.
Alice Moore| 7.9.09 @ 7:39AM
I think this modern trend started in the 1980s. Gary Crosby wrote a Daddy Dearest memoir and of course there was Joan Crawford's adoptive daughter who wrote "Mommy Dearest".
Teflon93| 7.9.09 @ 7:57AM
These things have a way of backfiring upon their perpetrators.
When I read the aforementioned "Mommy Dearest", my reaction was, "My, what an ungrateful little b---- Christina Crawford is!"
Guess what I think of "Christo".....
air jordan shoes| 7.9.09 @ 8:41AM
Thank you very much. I am wonderring if I can share your article in the bookmarks of society,Then more friends can talk about this problem.
Daniel Harden| 7.9.09 @ 8:44AM
One must not forget the nasty and tasteless, also self-absorbed memoir crafted as a novel, by Frankie Schaefer about his parents. The novel, PORTOFINO, held his parents up as well, not very balanced or attractive people to say the least. It was disgusting -- but now young Schaefer has jumped ship, supports Obama and clearly wants to "grow". They should form a "spoiled and self-absorbed child" fraternity. Imagine the stories they could swap.
David T.| 7.9.09 @ 9:19AM
Somebody recently called Christo "sophomoric." I can think of no better adjective to describe both the man and his writings.
Grzmlyk| 7.9.09 @ 9:23AM
I had heard that "Christo" had voted for Obama, so that pretty much says it all.
Then I saw him interviewed about this book on Fox News. My first thought, after vomiting, was that surely his mother had had a clandestine, inadvertently fruitful affair with a village idiot nine months prior to Chris's birth and that not one scintilla of WFB's DNA could possibly in this vapid, callow fool.
Then I realized that the resemblance to that famous profile probably precludes such a scenario.
And then I wished like hell that WFB had had a vasectomy back in 1950.
The acorn fell very, very far from the tree. Further proof that character is NOT an inherited trait.
Danny| 7.9.09 @ 9:26AM
Please make this article required reading for anyone with half a brain.
And please link it or send it to Bighollywood.
Richard Baker| 7.9.09 @ 10:15AM
Whatever happened to dignity and reticence? I guess Mr. Buckley missed those words in the dictionary. Also, ingrate and boor.
queen of the harpies| 7.9.09 @ 10:40AM
Baby Boom puke is apt. There is a certain breed of boomer that is terminally self-conscious; always acting like they have to prove something. Patti Davis comes to mind. I suppose this guy will soon be joining Ron Jr on Airhead America so they can marinate in their exquisite angst; maybe break out the guitar and sing a few protest songs.
bob| 7.9.09 @ 11:42AM
when i was young in the early 1960's, i remember reading "i couldn't smoke the grass on my father's lawn" by a hollywood scion, either edward g. robinson's or charlie chaplin's, i don't remember which. they were both bad boys.
Doctor Right| 7.9.09 @ 2:45PM
Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama.
That, in and of itself, is emblematic of the typical, childish, poke-in-the-eye, pseudo-rebellion that we've come to expect from baby-boomers...Especially the wealthy kind.
The boomers were angry at their parents for giving them a safe and prosperous lifestyle through hardwork and self-sacrifice. They (the boomers) had no real challenges, so they invented them for themselves, and dared their parenst to disapprove of either their motives or their means.
Chris Buckley's dad was one of the most influential Americans of the second half of the 20th century.
Chris Buckley, by contrast, is a turd.
Big Jim| 7.9.09 @ 5:38PM
Gary Crosby was insane like his mother but still managed to besmirsh the memory of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) entertainers of the 20th century. As stated above, Chris Buckley is a turd. I hope he's not as sucessful as crazy Gary.
Pierce| 7.9.09 @ 10:25PM
As my mother said, you grow up and leave the past behind. Most of these people cannot accept that. I have sympathy for Mr. Buckley for what pain he may have suffered in the past. I have no sympathy for him if he uses the past as an excuse for taking out his pain on the rest of society. Heck, that is one of the things we have lost.
John II| 7.9.09 @ 11:23PM
Bob: Slight clarification. The book you're referring to ("I Couldn't Smoke the Grass on my Father's Lawn") was published in 1966 by Michael Chaplin, one of Chaplin's eight children by Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright. Oona was 18 when Chaplin married her (his fourth wife) at the age of 54. In the fifties Chaplin settled permanently with his growing family in Vevey, Switzerland, where he died in his sleep of old age in December 1977. Oona lived rather a high life for another 14 years before she died of pancreatic cancer (caused by what you may suspect, if you're into the provenance of various cancers) at the age of 66 in
New York City. All eight of the children were apparently pretty troubled, to put it gently.
Edward G. Robinson had only one son, EGR Jr., who died at the age of 41 just one year after his famous father died in 1973 (two weeks after shooting his last film, "Soylent Green," opposite Charlton Heston). Robinson was a gentleman and a genuine lover of the arts. Chaplin was . . . well, Chaplin. De mortuo nil nisi bonum.
Grant| 7.11.09 @ 7:20AM
The fact that he wrote the book at all was enough for me. WFB, Jr., was a very prolific writer. If you think he habitually kept secrets, let "Cruising Speed" disabuse you. What more could we know, especially after "Nearer My God", about him? Rich pothead Christopher's "LM&P" could only be self-serving.
It's not just Oprah Nation, it's not just drug use and its associated effects, it's the descent of man. What's worst is rich pothead Christopher has been quoted as having lost his faith (Rod Dreher's interview, inter alii). Figures.
Dali Parton| 7.11.09 @ 11:08AM
This sounds like it may go down as a standout in the annals of FAIL. I have to suppose the point of writing the book was to engender sympathy but it's only going to ensure that everyone sees "Christo" (blecch) as a whiny obnoxious bedwetter.
Alan Brooks| 7.21.09 @ 7:27PM
Sad. Very sad.
this is no temporary rebellion, as Reagan's daughter's was.
cheap handbags| 7.25.09 @ 7:08PM
We only sell the top grade replica cheap handbags, some of them are genuine leather handbags, yet the price is far lower than the authentic designers want you to pay. We lead you to a genuine pool of bags : collections in wide range: handbags, shoulder bags, clutches, tote bags, purses and wallets, the hottest brands you can find like replica Louis Vuitton handbags, Replica marc jacobs handags, Replica Prada handbags, Coach,Replica Chloe handbags,Burberry, Dior,replica Chanel handbags, Chloe,Replica gucci handbags, Dolce & Gabbana,Replica Balenciaga handbags . Crafted to the highest standard, from the finest materials in the industry, we guarantee the toppest Replica Hermes handbags at low price you'll find anywhere.
cheap handbags| 7.26.09 @ 6:23PM
We only sell the top grade replica cheap handbags, some of them are genuine leather handbags, yet the price is far lower than the authentic designers want you to pay. We lead you to a genuine pool of bags : collections in wide range: handbags, shoulder bags, clutches, tote bags, purses and wallets, the hottest brands you can find like replica Louis Vuitton handbags, Replica marc jacobs handags, Replica Prada handbags, Coach,Replica Chloe handbags,Burberry, Dior,replica Chanel handbags, Chloe,Replica gucci handbags, Dolce & Gabbana,Replica Balenciaga handbags . Crafted to the highest standard, from the finest materials in the industry, we guarantee the toppest Replica Hermes handbags at low price you'll find anywhere.
george| 7.29.09 @ 2:39AM
LV Bequia Leather handbag , commonly referred to as
Louis Vuitton Bequia, or sometimes shortened to
Louis Vuitton Classic China Run handbags has become one of the most
Louis Vuitton Classic China Run luxury brands.
outlet louis vuittongood
lv outletl like
louis vuitton outletsgood
louis vuitton outlet storesnice
Steve Hunter| 7.29.09 @ 1:36PM
What his many critics, including La Bachrach, don't understand is that Buckley, like any child of an abusive parent, OWNS that story. It's his property, paid for in blood and tears and he has every moral right to squeeze every last sheckle out of it. If they don't like it, too bad for them. They don't matter.
Alan Brooks| 8.17.09 @ 10:00PM
but in Buckley's favor, what do Vuitton handbags, oriental peddlers, and other spammers have that he doesn't?
NFL jerseys| 8.31.09 @ 2:32AM
It is a wonderful article: NFL jerseys,Photoshop CS2,ghd Hair Straightener,Adobe Photoshop CS4.
dropshippngwatch| 9.2.09 @ 7:29AM
Replica Watch
Replica Watches
Fake Watch
Sales Replica Watches
Fake Watches
Fake Watch
Replica Watch
Replica Watches
Fake Watch
replica Rolex watches
Replica Richard Watches
Replica Romain Jerome Watches
Replica Tag Heuer Watches
Replica Tissot Watches
Replica Tudor Watches
Replica U-Boat Watches
Replica Ulysse Nardin Watches
Replica Vacheron Constantin Watches
Replica Versace Watches
http://www.dropshippingwatch.com
Wedding Dresses| 9.9.09 @ 8:25AM
Read this article, I see Wedding Dresses
Designer Wedding Gowns
lot of things