If you have read the New York Times excerpt from Christopher Buckley’s new book, you must read the book itself. Context is not always everything, but in this case it most certainly is. The Times excerpt catalogues parental sins committed against Christopher by Bill and Pat Buckley, and thus misleads readers by misrepresenting the underlying document.

Christopher has written an honest book, and there are those who will say that the last thing we need on this subject is an honest book. WFB’s memory is golden, a statue glistening in the sun, intimidating even the pigeons who circle at a respectful distance. Why not just declare the Buckley legacy a no-fly zone and be done with it? Easy for you to say, gentle reader. Not so easy, apparently, for Christopher Buckley, the only child of William Frank and Patricia Taylor Buckley. Not so easy, either, for their devoted fans, I’m learning. There are those who will say angry things about this book to Bill’s friends, who are assumed by the act of friendship to have taken up NoDoz sentinel duty on the parapets of his reputation. (And yes, it’s incontestably true that, had these WFB-PTB stories been spun by a political opponent, we Friends of Bill would have fallen on the poor bastard with an assault evoking shock and awe.) But here we are, confronted with the revelation from an unimpeachable source that both Bill and Pat were on more than a few occasions (to use Christopher’s word) . . . impossible.

I don’t know about you, but that revelation hits me with the impact of a Nerf ball hurled by a three-year-old. Take the most widely quoted instance of Bill’s allegedly abusive behavior, the time he walked out on Christopher’s college graduation ceremony. That classic “Bill being Bill” moment hurt Christopher, and it will hurt you as he relives it. It’s inexcusable. But it was not, alas, without either prequel or sequel. It was agreed by all who knew him that Bill Buckley was the world’s most impatient man. And it was acknowledged almost as widely that, if you’re going to write 50-some books and 5,000-some columns, edit a fortnightly magazine, host your own television show longer than Johnny Carson, build a political organization, and then use it to change the nation and the world, then it follows as Monday does Sunday that you’re not going to sit through many canned speeches. That’s the way the croissant crumbles and Christopher, in context, makes clear that he has come to appreciate The Man in full.

Then there’s the “chic, stunning Pat Buckley,” she of the three first names, a stylistic tic first observed by media historians in the primo Evans & Novak leaker, “tough, shrewd Mel Laird.” Pat was tall, dark, and gorgeous, salty of tongue, sharp of wit, and — at least on those memorable occasions — a bit short on the warmth and fuzz. I had a crush on her for years and she did me the kindness of flirting back. She was, in the full Bette Midler sense of the term, a piece of work, and utterly entertaining. But an evening with Pat Buckley was not all rum punch on a sandy beach. In the House of PTB, if you listened closely, you could usually hear a lit fuse hissing somewhere. I recall an occasion. Over the years I had reviewed in one publication or another many of Bill’s books, maybe 20 or so. Without exception, these reviews were rendered in the ecstatic mode: hyperventilationary variations of “I laughed. I cried. It changed my life.” One of those many books disappointed me for some reason, however, and, as I had committed to review it for a California newspaper, I said so in print, thoughtlessly dropping the word “trivial” along the way. Well, you would have thought that I had rented a billboard across the street from Zee Maisonette and painted the offending word in six-foot-high block letters. Two days after the review appeared — two days — Pat plowed through a passel of dinner guests and growled at me, “Trivial! Is that what you think of Bill’s work — trivial?” Then, to the undisguised delight of the transfixed dinner guests, Pat proceeded to, as they say in the urological literature, rip me a new one. It was a magnificent turn, played in dudgeon higher than high, quite the best performance art this reviewer had seen in many seasons. After which I picked myself up, stuffed what remained of my dignity in a back pocket, and went home, still nursing a crush on the Canadian Firecracker.

The problem for Christopher, of course, was that he was already home. He had to stay for breakfast, and the mortification he experienced on various occasions did not always dissipate overnight. I remember my first impression of him. Bill would bring him along on the campaign trail, asking me to “show Christo the ropes” (which I translated from the Billspeak as “Don’t lose track of the kid because I’m never returning to this nether region of Queens you somehow sneaked onto the schedule”). Christopher was 13 then, a sweet young man, fun and precociously observant but something of a nervous wreck, the result, perhaps, of being airmailed repeatedly from home to home, parent to parent. I wondered at the time how — or even whether — he would be able to find his way in life, billeted as he was with two people who routinely sucked up more than their share of the available oxygen.

Not to worry. In this small, well-formed, keenly observed book, Christopher Buckley makes it all the way home both as a writer and as a man. This is expository writing of the first rank, as finely crafted as anything WFB ever produced. It’s no more than surmise on my part, but I’ve long thought that Christopher took up the comic novel as a way to avoid invading his father’s airspace; that he sought shelter in the explicit distinction that Christo did his thing, Pup did his, with never the twain to meet. What we see in this book is that Christo can do Pup’s thing, too, and as readers we can only hope that he will do more of it in the years ahead. He’s good, very good. And as for those occasions? Well, what the Times didn’t tell you is that Christopher deals with them one by one, wrestles them into context, and walks away proud and privileged to have been the son of two loving parents. Not perfect people, to be sure, and manifestly not people gifted in the parental arts, but, in their son’s loving estimate, extraordinary people who richly blessed his life by sharing theirs.

By my count, only one occasion remains unresolved. When Christopher publishes his novel Boomsday, Bill brushes it off with an e-mailed postscript: “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.” That stung and Christopher admits as much, at least twice. Writing a book is sweat-stained work (for everybody but Bill, that is, who wrote them faster than anybody could read them) and Christopher was looking for something . . . more. Believe me, we’ve felt his pain. Everybody who got close to Bill knew that, while he was generous quite literally to a fault, when it came to writing, he wouldn’t give an inch — not on quality, not on style, and, oy, not on vocabulary. It was Bill’s conceit that if you couldn’t write you couldn’t think and if you couldn’t think you were unlikely to prosper in his friendship. I still have somewhere the first editorial I ever wrote for NR. Only a few of the typewritten words peek through the blaze of red-ink emendations scratched over the yellow foolscap. Every young writer whose copy fell under Bill’s jackhammer ballpoint can tell a similar tale. We NR alums, we know sting. What’s remarkable about Christopher’s literary career, then, is that his other 13 books did work for Bill. That was the judgment not of a loving father but of the finest editor of his generation. The ultimate praise.

Now Christo, about that Obama thing . . .