Unlike his 18th-century namesake, the hero of this outrageous "modern comedy" [Boswell] is as undiscriminating in his admiration of great men as an autograph collector. His fate, he is told as a boy by an eminent psychologist (his first in-the-flesh celebrity), is to be a holder of coats, a sitter at the captain's table, a persona grata.

As a professional wrestler in a bout with The Angel of Death, Boswell suddenly realizes that everybody dies, and the knowledge propels him into a parasitic gluttony of the ego, a series of formless monomaniac adventures on a relentless search for VIP's, at whose feet he curls like a worshipful puppy. The world's richest man, history's first international revolutionist, a Nobel Prize-winning anthropologist, an Italian principessa—all these and others Boswell pursues even while he knows that the frailties of the great are as huge as the faculties that put them on top of the heap.

All of Boswell's mad frolics amount to very little, despite his inordinate tendency to philosophize, albeit tongue-in-cheekly, on the meaning of his bizarre existence. The novel becomes an over-long single joke, perhaps because most of us having adjusted to both our mediocrity and our approaching death in less frantic (and less interesting) ways than Boswell has, will find it impossible to project ourselves into the spot of a man admittedly so uncommon. "Do others feel their uniqueness as much as I do?" Boswell asks. No. "Mine is sometimes staggeringly oppressive," Agreed.

If Stanley Elkin ever dives into a subject more worthy of his talents, I hope that I am around to witness the splash. It should be a big one. For even as we detachedly read Boswell, it is clear that Elkin writes marvelously well. Humor explodes in bursts. Scenes crackle with gusto and imaginative fertility, and his people pop off the page with overabundant flesh. A book less atypical, more human, and he'll be signing autographs himself.