[In the following review, Welty positively assesses the satire, parody, and wordplay of Perelman's Crazy Like a Fox.]

This looks like the unholy work of only one man. Reader, S. J. Perelman has struck again.

"Great, fatuous booby that I was"—these are the words of Perelman himself—"I imagined advertising would be destroyed from the outside. It won't; it's going to bubble and heave and finally expire in the arms of two nuns, like Oscar Wilde." Not if S. J. Perelman can help it, it won't. In fact, here lies the body before us now, with a sign left pinned to its jacket saying "Crazy Like a Fox."

Advertising is not the only victim of this man. With his Dyak-like tread he has crept up on the movies, on Corn, on Jitter-bugging, Bee-keeping, Fashion, then Chichi, and with a maniacal glitter in his eye has done his deadly work.

Read these random notes, torn secretly from the mordant evidence at hand. "I don't know much about medicine but I know what I like." . . . "A Schrafft hostess, well over nine feet tall, with ice mantling her summit, waved me toward the door marked 'Credentials.'" . . . "He caught my arm in a vise-like grip but with a blow I sent him groveling. In ten minutes he was back with a basket of appetizing, fresh-picked grovels. We squeezed them and drank the piquant juice thirstily." . . . "I had gone into the Corn Exchange Bank to exchange some corn." The clues are unmistakable. These are the notations of the Fox.

Even innocent Clifford Odets has not been allowed to escape. He has been dealt with callously. The Fox has down here notes for a play called "Waiting for Santy" and bitingly leaves word that "the parts of Rankin, Panken, Rivken, Riskin, Ruskin, Briskin and Praskin are interchangeable, and may be secured directly from your dealer or the factory." Has anyone seen Clifford Odets lately?

There are other victims, even more innocent than Odets. "Take a small boy smeared with honey," we find here, "and lower him between the walls. The bees will fasten themselves to him by the hundreds and can be scraped off after he is pulled up, after which the boy can be thrown away. If no small boy smeared with honey can be found, it may be necessary to take an ordinary small boy and smear him, which should be a pleasure."

The strange part is, Perelman refers to his deeds as "prose." But Perelman's "prose" was never a simple thing, like mother love, or even like other prose. It is highly complex, deviously organized—the work of some master brain being undoubtedly behind it—and is more like jiu-jitsu than any prose most of us have ever seen.

There is, for instance, that sudden materializing of figures of speech, calculated to throw the bystander, or reader, over the head of the sentence and press a little nerve at the back of his ear. "Mr. Mifflin, in a porous-knit union suit from Franklin Simon's street floor, is stretched out by the fire like a great, tawny cat. Inasmuch as there is a great, tawny cat stretched out alongside him, also wearing a porous-knit union suit, it is not immediately apparent which is Mifflin." (Mrs. Mifflin's presence on the scene does not help any—she "is seated at the console of her Wurlitzer, softly wurlitzing to herself.")

By Perelman's evil plot every too-familiar name of this world is going to get caught in an insidious tangle from which it is doubtful, now, that any will ever become extricated. "In one corner [of Schrafft's] Nick Kenny, Jack Benny, James Rennie, Sonja Henie and E. R. Penney, the chain store magnet, were gaily comparing pocketbooks to see who had the most money." All about, trade and advertising clichés are shooting through the air like bullets. "It's a heller—Altman's, of course?" asks a lady of her daughter Giselle who is in her wedding dress, and Giselle sputters, "Yes, and available in nineteen different shades—among them wine, russet, beige, peach, grackle, stone, liver, lover, blub ber, blabber and clabber."

Every reader is entitled to his own moment for collapse, but this reviewer takes hers during a very short play of the advertising underworld when a lady enters on the line, "Don't mind us, Verna, we just dropped in to sneer at your towels."

There are those who think that Perelman no longer slays with the old abandon. They declare that some of that fine early madness is missing, and that one day the Fox may be caught. These are optimists. There is both old and new evidence in the forty-eight pieces here collected—and though Perelman may not scatter the red herrings to which we have become accustomed, something mighty like a herring, and mighty frisky, goes scampering across all 269 pages with every $2.50 purchase of the book, according to the steadier witnesses. Or perhaps it is not a red herring but that which, or whom, Perelman calls "Pandemonium, the upstairs girl."