Writing makes for an odd family business. As a solitary occupation conducted largely in one’s head, it offers few of the opportunities for hands-on apprenticeship afforded by, say, a marmalade factory. Nor is there any specialized equipment to pass on; even when their ancestors have done well in the trade, would-be authors inherit little more tangible than a name. It is impressive, then, that four generations of the Waugh family, most notably Evelyn, have found success as writers. Evelyn’s grandson Alexander Waugh has now chronicled their intertwined lives and work in “Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family” (Doubleday, 454 pages, $27.50).

The dynasty began with Mr. Waugh’s great-grandfather Arthur, a publisher and literary critic whose two sons, Alec and Evelyn, became novelists. Arthur doted outrageously on Alec, to Evelyn’s lasting resentment, and poured his stifling love for him into his work. When Arthur published a collection of essays, it was not only dedicated to Alec but also bound in the colors of his boarding school. “I only did it to please Alec,” he said of the book in one of the many unpublished letters that enrich Mr. Waugh’s account.

Arthur was drippily sentimental and deeply parochial, with a worldview encapsulated in his maxim that “with a thorough knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac, you can’t go wrong.” Although Arthur’s descendants retained his love for England, Mr. Waugh shows clearly how a reaction against his painful sincerity shaped them as fathers and as writers. Mr. Waugh recalls his father, the journalist and self-described “master of the vituperative arts” Auberon, defining sentimentality as “the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine feeling.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Waugh and his father never had a single serious conversation.

Arthur’s treatment of his sons backfired in both cases. Alec’s first novel was a succès de scandale about homosexuality among schoolboys; few subjects could have been more painful for his father, whose vicarious pleasure in his son’s school career was such that he reckoned “the weeks when you were getting into the cricket 11” among the happiest of his life. Alec later settled into a solid career of minor novels and major adultery, the latter facilitated by his constant travels. “Polynesians, as hula dancers, acquire an astonishing mobility between the knees and navel,” he explained, with an almost audible sigh. For his part, Evelyn repaid his father’s favoritism with a series of veiled but needling portraits in his fiction. Mr. Waugh is particularly good at teasing out the implications of the various guises in which Arthur appears, such as the lapsed clergyman Mr. Prendergast in “Decline and Fall.”

From Arthur, Mr. Waugh moves toward the present, neatly synthesizing family diaries, letters, and lore with his own memories. Although it is interesting to have his judgments on Evelyn’s own memoir, “A Little Learning,” it is also a

relief when Auberon duly comes to the fore. Evelyn, who saw his children as “defective adults” and suggested that “host and guest” was the best model for father-son relations, seems as unpleasant as ever, despite Mr. Waugh’s special pleading on his behalf. Mr. Waugh’s candid memoir of his father, though brief, is an intriguing example of the unpredictable effect of parental influence. Not only did Auberon do “nothing to inspire in me a love of books,” he offered to match the advance payment for Mr. Waugh’s first book if he would agree not to publish it. For his pains, he got another writing Waugh as a son.

Despite the authoritative tone of its title, with its echoes of Turgenev and Edmund Gosse’s classic Victorian memoir, “Fathers and Sons” began almost as a defensive maneuver. After his father’s death in 2000, Mr. Waugh found himself increasingly plagued by comparisons to his forebears. Realizing that his own work would always have to “be passed through the Evelyn-Auberon masher” before being judged on its merits, he decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against public curiosity and “blow the whole thing out in one almighty atchoo.”

Mr. Waugh’s reluctance as a biographer is compounded by his conviction that seriousness is “a form of stupidity.” To be wary of excessive earnestness in a memoir is understandable, but too often he lapses into juvenile jeering as a ward against dread sentimentality. At one point, he refers to a reviewer named Mollie Panter-Downes, who panned his father’s first novel as “Ms Pants-Down”; later, he tags a (male) editor who crossed him as “pasty-titted.”

Equally unappealing is the tendency for Mr. Waugh’s family pride to curdle into smugness, as when he describes the profanely derisive toast he gave to the memory of C. R.M.F. Cruttwell at a gathering of Waugh scholars. Cruttwell was an eminent historian and Evelyn’s tutor at Oxford. The two clashed, and his offenses apparently still rankle the Waugh family eight decades after the fact. Evelyn retaliated by slandering Cruttwell as a “dog-sodomist,” a cudgel Mr. Waugh takes up eagerly, comparing his familial obligation to a Mafia code of honor. Mr. Waugh conjures the unfunny image of Cruttwell setting upon dogs “with urgent, lascivious strokes, ramming at them with his fat merciless trunk.” Here, as in his denunciation of the “abominable habits” of the Scottish, Mr. Waugh strains to be flippantly wicked, with dismal results. The defects of Mr. Waugh’s style can hardly spoil the richness of his material, however, and his book is a fascinating and illuminating portrait of a prodigious family.

Mr. Farrington is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker.