SOURCE: "He Is a Few of His Favorite Things," in The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1992, pp. 9-10.

In the following review, Nightingale offers a generally favorable assessment of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation.

According to Monster in a Box, the author and performance artist Spalding Gray's mother lowered her Christian Science Monitor one morning and looked him in the eyes more clearly, steadily and uncrazily than she had for a long time. "How shall I do it, dear?" she asked. "How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?"

It is almost exactly the same question the fictional Brewster North's fictional mother directs at him in Impossible Vacation, and it turns out to be no less ominous. Spalding Gray's mother gassed herself with exhaust fumes while he was on holiday in Mexico. Brewster is in the same place...