Books on Monday: Fathers and Sons
Alexander Waugh has written two books, Time and God, and, now, a third, about material that’s considerably less remote and abstract. Every review of his “autobiography of a family” – reconstructed largely from family letters – has outlined an irresistibly strange story, beginning with “the Brute” and going on to describe one of the odder cases of paternal devotion. And that’s before we even get to the most famous Waugh of all – a character who, as he did in his family, spends his youth on the margins, as a Not Very Important Person. It is a sign of Mr Waugh’s accomplishment that his book is utterly free of “setting the record straight.” (Nor does he pretend to let it “speak for itself.”) Books like this are usually epiphenomena, trivially traveling in the wake of more important work. But Fathers and Sons would be a great book even if the author’s grandfather were no better known than his great-grandfather. If anything, readers curious to know more about the best comic novelist of the Twentieth Century may be in for a disappointment; this book does not hang on a dead writer’s fame. It promises, rather, great things for that of a living writer, namely, the author.
¶ Fathers and Sons.
