["Slouching Towards Kalamazoo"] is vintage De Vries, a perfect example of the sort of hilarious and expertly crafted comic novel that he amazingly seems to be able to turn out annually. "Don't you think the important thing when you're freezing to death is to keep your cool?" asks Mr. De Vries's hero near the beginning of the novel, and you immediately know that you are cheerfully once again in the hands of America's master of comic wordplay.

The time of "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" is the early 1960's, shortly before the onset of the sexual revolution and other major American upheavals, and the place is an unnamed North Dakota town that the novel's off-the-wall first-person narrator, a 15-year-old junior high school student named Anthony Thrasher, chooses to refer to as Ulalume. Young Anthony, who is spending his second year in the eighth grade, is an academic underachiever if there...