Bound for Graceland.

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 celebrity. The Sixties amount to a distant dream transpiring outside the Elvis bubble and (more curiously) beyond the immediate concern of former student radical Orson Killere. Later there is "the Vietnam business." Forget the Gulf of Tonkin or the Tet offensive: Orson's got to persuade Priscilla Presley not to be jealous of Ann-Margret. American society is torn apart by assassinations, riots, demonstrations, the whole mess. Meanwhile, Elvis's main problem is that he is staying too long in Hollywood, making bad movies in order to support Colonel Tom Parker's gambling habit and to indulge his own profligate impulses (such as purchasing Cadillacs by the dozen to bestow as tips and door prizes). Le roi gouverne par lui-meme, as one of the Elvis mafia remarks, in a Buckleyesque scintillation borrowed from Versailles. The King rules alone.

Buckley also reproduces Elvis's bizarre, hilarious visit to Richard Nixon in 1970, when the King volunteered to campaign against drugs (an immense burlesque of denial, given Elvis's dependence on a variety of uppers and downers), and asked for a badge identifying him as a federal drug-enforcement officer. Nixon, somewhat baffled, arranged it.

Orson beats his cocaine habit, but Elvis sinks deeper into his personal abyss. He goes blank in the middle of performances. He loses Priscilla, the child-bride (and Orson's childhood friend) whom he had picked out years before when she was the preadolescent stepdaughter of a U.S. Army captain in Germany. Now, all the skill of the tailors who fashion Elvis's caped and spangled Liberace jumpsuits cannot conceal the lamentable fat. Elvis consumes two cheese omelets and a pound of bacon for breakfast, while lecturing Orson about the evils of booze.

Buckley writes of Elvis with likeable kindness, his notes of admiration and elegy uncomplicated by the condescension one might have expected. I myself was a geeky kid of Orson's age when Elvis first appeared on Ed Sullivan. I vaguely liked his songs, but the whole phenomenon (the censored camera shots, the girls' demented squealing, and later on, the disquisitions on the Meaning of Elvis) struck me as silly and weird. His ascension as a god of popular culture left me feeling as baffled as Nixon.

When I visited Graceland several years ago, I left with a sense of its oppressive tackiness-of white shag carpets spread through the rooms like airy, sticky-sweet Fluff. On the wall of a basement corridor, I noticed a small framed quotation from John Lennon: "Before Elvis, there was nothing." In the garden where the King is buried, people filed by hushed and worshipful, as in the presence of a saint. I thought the whole thing was American Fellini. But then, about Elvis Presley I may know less than one of the infinite monkeys, and, it seems, infinitely less than William F. Buckley Jr. Elvis in the Morning-wistful, with moments of subdued radiance-is a familiar story told in a strange and original way. The overall effect is immensely touching, and even has a quality of grace, in the religious sense of the word.