The Brute begat Arthur Waugh, the first of the literary Waughs, who pursued a career in publishing despite his father’s objections. And Arthur Waugh begat two writers, Alec and Evelyn. Alec, who would never rival his younger brother in literary achievements, was his father’s cherished favorite — so much so that Arthur Waugh would compare himself to God the Father and Alec to Jesus Christ .  Evelyn, who yearned for his father’s approval, was routinely dismissed: “As future ‘head of family,’ Alec was always served first at table. He always got the best presents. Everything Evelyn was given came to him ‘shop-soiled and second-hand,’ and he knew it.”  Alec was sent to a posh boarding school, while Evelyn was sent to a cheaper day school. Alec received doting, love-sick letters from his father, while Evelyn received far more perfunctory epistles.  After several years in the wilderness — drinking, overspending, feeling suicidal — Evelyn Waugh made a splash with his biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and two novels, “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies,” the latter of which established him as a genuine literary star and put him “at the forefront of modern English letters,” where he would remain to the end of his life.  “The father-and-son relationship provides one of the central themes of his fiction, running, almost obsessively through every book,” Alexander Waugh writes of his grandfather’s work. “But not until his last novel does the reader get to witness a father-son relationship that is even partially successful. In ‘Unconditional Surrender,’ for the first time, a father is seen to take his paternal responsibilities seriously, and the advice he gives to his son is both meaningful and beneficial. To Evelyn, full realization of his own father’s worth only became apparent after Arthur’s death.”  In the view of Alec Waugh, their father’s death would also bring a new emotionalism to his brother’s work: having rebelled for years against his father’s theatricality, Evelyn finally allowed himself, with books like “Brideshead Revisited,” to probe feelings he had once dismissed as sentimental. What’s more, he would become more and more like his father with the passage of time. As his grandson writes:  “In the 1930’s Evelyn was a figurehead of the younger generation. He stood for all that was fast, brash, witty and loud, but after the war he transformed himself into an old-fashioned clown not unlike his father. He wore outmoded and outlandish suits and hats, insisted on changing for dinner, surrounded himself with Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac and, like his father, appeared to the world as an arcane eccentric from a Victorian novel.”  Though Evelyn Waugh mellowed in his later years (a development his son curiously attributed to a dental operation in which he had all of his teeth removed without anesthetic), he was for many years a terrifying parent, reserving the right, as Auberon put it, “not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike for them.” His wife Laura seems to have been an equally wanting parent, more concerned with her beloved pet cows than with her children.  Despite his appalling childhood, Auberon Waugh — whose essays and satirical writings, in the view of critics like A. N. Wilson and V. S. Naipaul, surpassed even the achievement of his famous progenitor — would become, in his son’s words, “a loyal, generous father,” albeit an unconventional one.  “He took no interest in my homework or my school marks,” Alexander Waugh writes, “or whether I made it into the school cricket team.” He never recommended books his son might like and never had serious conversations with the boy. And yet, in the wake of his death in 2001, his son seems to have decided to write this book, at least in part as a kind of tribute to him.  “He provided a more stable upbringing to his four children than he himself had ever received, and left more goodwill towards the name than he had inherited from his father,” Alexander Waugh writes at the end of this compelling family portrait. “Papa was the most impressive man I have ever met.”  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Literary Dynasty, Warts And All. Today's Paper|Subscribe
With this “autobiography” of his family, Alexander Waugh demonstrates that he’s inherited the literary gene in spades, as well as a gift for very funny, coruscating prose.