Dating Your Mom

From the opening essay, “The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo (Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)” to the title piece that discusses ways in which you might begin a romance with your mother (“In today’s fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore...”) to a parody that features Samuel Beckett as a pilot giving an existential in-flight speech to the passengers, the twenty-five comic essays in this delightful collection are nothing short of brilliant. Ian Frazier, long considered one of our most treasured humorists, proves that comedy can be just as smart as it is entertaining. Library Journal Something less than short stories, something more than mere jokes, the pieces collected in this volume (most of them first published in the New Yorker ) poke fun at all kinds of cultural pretensions, both highbrow and lowbrow. Among the offerings: a musicological essay that extracts preposterous biographical information from an old telephone bill of Stravinsky's; a literary history of the ``age of Niven'' that analyzes books by movie actors; and a page from Mrs. Solzhenitsyn's daybook that records such big events as taking Al's old Siberia clothes to the Fire Department rummage sale. Frazier's humor is reminiscent of fellow New Yorker contributor Donald Barthelme's, but is generally less philosophical and more slapstick. It's intellectual, but it's also pretty dumb. Recommended for some fiction collections. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles