SOURCE: "A Storyteller's Attempt at a Novel," in The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1992, p. A8.

In the following review, Lescaze offers a tempered assessment of Impossible Vacation.

Spalding Gray is a comic storyteller in the rich tradition of American naifs to whom amazing things happen. He is a spinner of tales for the angst-bitten and the confused, for whom a part of life's basic joke is that they understand what's happening, they just don't know how to cope with it.

He became known first on stage and then on screen with his witty theatrical monologues, notably Swimming to Cambodia, relating his adventures as a bit player in the powerful Roland Joffe movie The Killing Fields.

Now, Mr. Gray has written his first novel, Impossible Vacation. The book has much in common with his works for the theater, and at its best it is sharply observed and amusing.

Impossible...