THE late John Gregory Dunne had about as shrewd an eye for familial wretchedness as he did for a well-turned sentence -- and that was a very formidable eye, indeed.
Back in the early 1980s, when a certain segment of America's public television audience went rather understandably gaga for John Mortimer's brilliant 11-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel "Brideshead Revisited," Dunne remarked upon the irreducible dilemma at that undeniably great book's core: The narrator and principal character, Charles Ryder, is not simply a priggish snob but a breathtakingly cold and unfeeling father.
Yet, there he is at the very center of what many regard as the 20th century's finest English novel, a book whose structure and sentences are almost heartbreakingly beautiful.
Similar dilemmas attain for those who esteem "Decline and Fall" and "Vile Bodies" as two of their era's finest novels, who think "Scoop" and "The Loved One" are the best satiric novels ever written about journalism and Hollywood, or who believe that the "Sword of Honour" trilogy is a deathless account of men at war.
Evelyn Waugh, in other words -- to borrow his character Lord Marchmain's self-description -- still constitutes a "scandal" to his antagonists and "a stumbling block to [his] own party."
For most American readers, Evelyn also remains \o7the\f7 Waugh, and one of the many pleasures to be had from his grandson Alexander's immensely valuable and altogether engrossing account of their clan, "Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family," is the illumination it casts on the familial origins of so many of the elder writer's memorable characters.
Forty-four-year-old Alexander has been a newspaper music critic, an author and -- along with his brother Nathaniel -- an award-winning musical playwright and British television personality. He thus belongs to the fourth generation of Waughs to take their living from the writing trade, though his book persuasively locates the first cause of the family's fecund dysfunction to his great-great-grandfather Dr. Alexander Waugh, whose great passions in life appear to have been blood sports, the invention of surgical forceps and the sadistic physical and emotional torment of his entire household, particularly his children. To this day, his progeny casually recall him as "the Brute."
