Richard Condon has tireless wit (though sometimes it fatigues the reader) and must enjoy what he is doing without necessarily believing it. And what he does can be fun—Nabokov without tears. (p. 10)

From internal evidence, one judges that [Condon] knows full well what he is doing, even if he might prefer to be doing something wise rather than shrewd. He bills ["Bandicoot"] as the companion to "Arigato," which is one I missed; but burrowing "as fast as a man can dig"—as in the description of the Australian rodent, the bandicoot, printed in the front of the book—I seemed to make sufficient sense, or nonsense, of an entertainer's latest entertainment.

Here … we have world travel, the famous and the rich, the powerful and the wicked, plus the usual food, drink and girlish meat-strudel of a Condon concoction. A certain megapop tic limits any commitment. We suspend both belief and disbelief. Is Richard Condon too smart for the novel? One wishes he didn't fall back on clever tics. Names are dropped or pulled in for laffs. Sometimes the burlesque gets the laugh he wants, as when an Olympic freestyle sexual event ends with: "Bitsy's frequent outcries were so piercing that they were taken for small craft warnings by fishing vessels."…

Mr. Condon's people at least allow us to believe in ourselves; we remain alive though reading. One wishes fairly steadily now that he would not waylay us with show-biz puns and characters named after real people familiar to those who followed Cholly Knickerbocker's columns.

"Bandicoot" is a confection that amuses. It might be better if, in his self-delighted way, Mr. Condon made another stab at living up to the ringing proclamation of his essay on The Novel in Harper's: "When we want to understand grief beyond grief, or the external confrontation of man and woman, man and God, man and himself, we go to the novel." Failing grief beyond grief and eternal confrontations, we can here at least take pleasure in some frequent and piercing offhand funning that will hardly disturb any fishing vessels. (p. 39)