SOURCE: "Caught in the Web of Words," in Book World—The Washington Post, January 23, 1994, pp. 1, 10.

[In the following review, Dirda lauds the humorous aspects of A Frolic of His Own, calling the book "a superb comic novel."]

How is it that the greatest fiction of our century has been so funny? Joyce and Proust, obviously; but think too of Evelyn Waugh, Catch-22, Lolita, much of Invisible Man, Pynchon, The Master and Margarita, Beckett, Borges. Nothing, it would seem, dates so quickly as the earnest. Really Serious Novels—by D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf—now sound tendentious, a bit histrionic, often downright embarrassing. Perhaps, to quote Lawrence himself, because ours is such a tragic age we instinctively refuse to take it tragically. There's simply no other way to keep on going when the world is so clearly a hell of fraud, phoniness and moral vacuity, a bloody...