Bound for Graceland.(Review)

Elvis in the Morning, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Harcourt, 328 pages, $25)

An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters might peck for a year or two before they stumbled upon the charming idea of matching up William F. Buckley Jr. and Elvis Presley. Elvis in the Morning is Buckley's sweet, improbable study of the King's rise and dissolution. The novel imagines Elvis from the early days when he had the face of a Greek god pouting (and the most notorious, hydraulic pelvis in America), through fame, his imprisonment in the bubble that is the downside of celebrity, and the long sad collapse to his death in 1977 at the age of 42.

Buckley interbraids Elvis's story with that of a fictional character named Orson Killere, also something of a surprise-an impetuous political radical given to Elvis-worship. Young Killere's trajectory runs from adolescent Marxism (he gets thrown out of the University of Michigan for trying to imprison the board of trustees at a demonstration, and helps to found something called Students for a Democratic Peace) through a wandering Jack Kerouac phase, to a point where the young man, though still half-heartedly talking a radical's game, does pioneering work in the early computer business, is rewarded with stock options at Hewlett-Packard, and eventually gets fired for snorting cocaine.

Buckley arranges a delightful first meeting for Elvis and Orson. Elvis is an Army private stationed in Germany. Orson lives at the Army base in Wiesbaden, where his widowed mother works as a personnel administrator. Orson, a 14-year-old who has developed utopian Communist ideas under the influence of a leftist teacher, becomes smitten by the records of a new singer called Elvis Presley. The willfully original Orson decides that it is a social injustice that German teenagers cannot afford to buy the Elvis records for themselves. He breaks into the PX one night with the idea of stealing all the records and distributing them, free, to Elvis-deprived German youth. The MPs catch him. A military court sentences Orson to 30 days' confinement (in his mother's custody), with the further stipulation that he is not to listen to any Elvis Presley during this time. Elvis reads about the case in the newspaper, and presently shows up, with his guitar, at the Killere house. "I'm Elvis Presley," he announces to Mrs. Killere, "and I've come to sing to Orson, on account he cayunt hear me on the record player." Before long, Elvis launches into "All Shook Up."

Buckley's book possesses something of the same attractive and somehow private generosity as Elvis's kitchen concert. Over the years, Orson and Elvis develop a friendship that has a gentle sweetness about it precisely because it is hidden from the world. Elvis is impulsively generous but incurably self-infatuated. Orson functions as Elvis's guardian angel, the unconditionally worshipful fan who can speak truth to the King even as Elvis's Memphis mafia degenerates into a court of codependents.

In part, the novel is an examination of the solipsism of ...