[Waldo is a] good funny novel. It starts, appropriately enough, with the hero's getting a cream pie flung in his face and ends Paul Theroux 1941– Photograph by Mark Gersonwith his becoming a star cabaret turn, as a sort of Writer in Residence—the Residence being a glass bubble in the middle of a dance floor. While Waldo is inside, pecking away at the typewriter, the subject of his prize article stands outside, reciting the story that made them both rich and famous: "Dying Mother Tells All." Thousands cheer.

Waldo's progress is like some kind of Mod Candide. We see him through college, in a home for delinquent boys, in running fights with his parents, and in bed for weeks on end with an aging, nympomaniac starlet…. His disintegration is made quite literal (all his hair falls out) and it is a pity that, toward the end, the...